TIME Awards a Special Mention to Amber Solution’s AC Switch in its List of Best Inventions of 2021

Amber Solutions, the innovative company dedicated to making electricity safer and smarter through solid-state technologies, today announced that TIME has awarded its AC Switch with a Special Mention in its Best Inventions of 2021 list that came out earlier this week.

To assemble its list of 2021’s Best Inventions, TIME solicited nominations across a variety of categories from its editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online registration process. The magazine then evaluated each contender on several key factors, including originality, creativity, efficacy, ambition, and impact.

The result is a list of 100 groundbreaking inventions—including vaccines for COVID-19 and malaria, an emotional support robot for hospitalized children, an environmentally friendly dye for jeans and a brand new pasta shape—that are changing how people live, work, play and think about what’s possible.

In awarding a Special Mention to the Amber AC Switch™, TIME’s Patrick Lucas Austin noted that, “More than 50,000 houses are damaged by electrical fires annually—which makes sense when you realize that home electrical systems can be decades or even a century old. Amber’s digital electrical conversion system can prevent problems before they start by swapping out analog components in favor of a digital system on a chip. With no moving parts and electricity regulation handled digitally, physical wear and tear is nearly eliminated. Amber’s technology can also be fitted into existing circuit breakers, detecting surges, and stopping them before any damage occurs.”

When notified of the Special Mention, Amber Solutions Founder and CEO Thar Casey emphasized that, “Amber’s patented digital control of electricity in solid-state architecture is ushering a global revolution in more efficient power delivery and building intelligence, and we are thrilled that our fundamental innovations are being recognized by the technology community and certainly by the editors of TIME.”  

He continued, “The application of our breakthroughs is the opportunity to upgrade every outlet, light switch, circuit breaker – literally every electrical end-point and electrical appliance in every building on earth to silicon chip-based architecture with embedded intelligence and IoT connectivity – truly a second electrical revolution.”

Amber recently released a video demonstration of one specific example of the revolutionary nature of its Amber Indestructible AC Switch™ specifically — successfully suppressing 450 inductive load surges (typically thousands of volts each) over 15 consecutive minutes to just 260 volts each. Every AC-switch needs to be a protection device both for users and for the device itself. Until Amber, solid-state based AC switches could never survive the harsh electrical environment of the AC-mains. Amber solid-state technologies are so advanced that they deliver the major advantages of smaller silicon chip-sized form factors, including advanced digital surge protection, arc free switching, increased switching speed by many thousands of times faster, and higher quality with enhanced reliability—even when paired with traditional electro-mechanical architecture, as shown in this video.