Innovation abounds in device charging

The changes may be less perceptible than in smartphones, tablets, or wearables, but chargers have also been quietly reinvented over the last decade. At one time a bulky mix of tangled cables and connectors, slow to perform and prone to overheating, they’re now smaller, safer, and faster, thanks to a slew of technological advances. These advances include a switch to gallium nitride (GaN), which has now usurped silicon as the preferred semiconductor, capable of handling higher voltages, faster swi