Power electronics involves a whole range of critical applications, from electrification to smart grids. It is a fundamental pillar for the entire industry to meet climate change demands.

PowerUP Expo 2022, to be held virtually from June 28 to 30, will feature several topic-specific keynotes, panel discussions, technical presentations, and tutorials on key technical trends, market requirements, and new application areas. An exhibition hall will also feature virtual booths from leading power electronics companies, as well as a chat tool enabling visitors to directly connect with each other, with the hosts, and with the exhibiting companies.

All industrial sectors, including the consumer sector, are driven by efficiency. Efficiency in electronic systems can contribute to performance restrictions and shorter service life. GaN and SiC power devices are advancing beyond various applications due to their smaller size, weight, and cost, as well as improved efficiency. The global SiC and GaN scenes have been defined by progress and expanding industrial adoption in recent decades. In the meantime, other semiconductor devices handle motor control and driving. Cost-effective and energy-efficient control solutions, test and measurement solutions, and transducers/sensors simplify design and give a high degree of integration as efficiency criteria for these applications increase.

On the first day, you may watch presentations on demand, and if you have any questions, you may come back June 29–30 to chat with the speakers. The preview is online for 24 hours. On June 28, several lectures will play during the day. In particular, Victor Veliadis, IEEE Fellow, executive director and CTO of PowerAmerica, and professor in electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, will review key aspects of SiC fabrication technology and outline non-CMOS compatible processes that have been streamlined to allow for mass SiC device fabrication in standard Si fabs.

Marco Palma, director of motor drive systems and applications at EPC, will review the performance of GaN in motor drives. He will give a lecture titled “Integrated Circuit GaN inverter for Motor Drive Applications above 1 kW.”

Satya Dixit, board member and advisor at Future Semiconductor Business (FSB), will review the available methods currently in practice and the new and upcoming technologies in creating GaN membranes to apply to future applications.

Peter Gammon, professor of power electronic devices at the University of Warwick and founder of PGC Consultancy, will review work on the development of high-voltage MOSFETs, superjunction devices, and bipolar devices (IGBTs and thyristors) up to voltage ratings of more than 20 kV. Finally, another application that remains relatively unexplored is SiC’s use in space, requiring radiation-hardened devices.

Then Martin Schulz, global principal of application engineering at Littelfuse, will get into details of conducting the correlated measurements as well as offer insight into the way a lifetime can be predicted. The procedures described will also reveal the kind of information needed to achieve a high level of confidence for the statement on lifetime.

The second day will continue with more talks.

Matthias Kasper, lead principal engineer of System Innovations Lab at Infineon Technologies Austria, will open the session talking about system benefits of GaN and SiC devices in the next generation of on-board chargers and USB-C adapters with ultra-high power density.

Then we have two keynotes. Cristian Ionescu-Catrina, senior product marketing manager at Power Integrations, will discuss the growth in the market for BLDCs and permanent magnet motors that address the market up to 400 W, as well as the factors that are driving the need for new solutions that are energy-efficient and reliable. He will introduce BridgeSwitch, Power Integrations’ innovative single- and three-phase motor driver IC family, and the latest Motor-Expert GUI — unique in the market — which makes design and certification simpler and faster, reducing time to market.

David Snook, manager GaN products at Texas Instruments, will explore the key systems benefitting from GaN today, overcoming perceived challenges in designing with GaN, and the future of GaN in next-generation industrial applications.

After this first part, there will be many technical talks, as outlined in the agenda.

Karthi Gopalan, general manager of the Isolation Business Unit for Industrial Automation at Analog Devices, will open the section talking about energy harvesting. The presentation will demonstrate how intelligent energy harvesting and innovative digital isolation solutions can have a big impact: For wireless IoT, energy harvesting has the potential to up the power sustainably.

Cesar Johnston, CEO of Energous, will offer a keynote about wireless power, discussing the rise of wireless power networks that not only deliver reliable and consistent wireless power but also help aggregate IoT device data transfer to the cloud from the next generation of IoT deployments. Wurth will talk in the other keynote about supercapacitors.

For other technical talks, please check the agenda.

Energy is essential to economic growth and prosperity. While renewable energy will mitigate climate change, it needs to be cost-competitive with traditional forms of energy and easily accessible to ensure a sustainable future that meets the energy needs of future generations. A 21st century zero-emission energy network must be enabled by power electronics that minimize adverse impacts of greenhouse emissions and transition global economies to a sustainable growth path.

Hassane El-Khoury, president and CEO of onsemi, will share his insights (opening) into energy infrastructure and how onsemi is not only working on its own net-zero goals but innovating to deliver high-performance products today for the sustainable ecosystem’s energy needs of tomorrow.

Then Guy Moxey, senior director of power marketing at Wolfspeed, will talk about SiC to improve the power architectures used in such systems so that the power semiconductor is no longer the weak link, or gating factor, for global green energy.

Filippo Di Giovanni, strategic marketing, innovation, and key programs manager for the Power Transistor Macro Division at STMicroelectronics, will give the other keynote, titled “Broad adoption of SiC MOSFETs in EVs accelerates electrification and brings benefit to industrial applications.”

For other technical talks, please check the agenda.

See you at PowerUP! Register now for free.

SiC and GaN: A Tale of Two Semiconductors

Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio has a Ph.D. in Physics and is a Telecommunications Engineer. He has worked on various international projects in the field of gravitational waves research designing a thermal compensation system, x-ray microbeams, and space technologies for communications and motor control. Since 2007, he has collaborated with several Italian and English blogs and magazines as a technical writer, specializing in electronics and technology. From 2015 to 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Firmware and Elettronica Open Source. Maurizio enjoys writing and telling stories about Power Electronics, Wide Bandgap Semiconductors, Automotive, IoT, Digital, Energy, and Quantum. Maurizio is currently editor-in-chief of Power Electronics News and EEWeb, and European Correspondent of EE Times. He is the host of PowerUP, a podcast about power electronics. He has contributed to a number of technical and scientific articles as well as a couple of Springer books on energy harvesting and data acquisition and control systems.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.