IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - December 2019 - 52

critical and must be addressed to ensure successful battlefield operations. Toward that goal, the U.S. Army has
established six modernization priorities.
Finally, Dr. Tan demonstrated an adiabatic power conversion technology that requires no dedicated thermal
management. During his talk, "Ultra High Power Density
Demands 99% Efficiency and 99% Duty Ratio," he asserted
that achieving such goals (99% efficiency) will require
the leveraging of distributed low-profile packaging, minimum-inductive storage, capacitive energy transfer, partial
power processing, integrated wide-bandgap devices, modularity, and scalability. Dr. Tan predicted that the power
electronics industry will achieve an order-of-magnitude

improvement in power density within a few years
(Figure 3). In essence, he said that for isolated circuits,
adiabatic performance is possible by combining doubleforward architecture with soft-pulsewidth modulation
switching. Likewise, for nonisolated circuits with a full
duty ratio, Dr. Tan proposed that, by combining switchedcapacitor techniques with half-resonance and integrated
controller and gate drive ICs, it is possible to achieve adiabatic performance.

Special Sessions

Normalized Value (pGaN = 1)

Of the 18 special sessions, two were very special. Although
Empower a Billion Lives (EBL) named the five finalists of
the IEEE EBL competition that was launched in 2018 to
attract economically viable and scalable energy access solutions for remote regions of the world with extreme energy
Figures-of-Merit for 600-650-V Devices
14
(Normalized to GaN eMode)
poverty and an average income of less than US$2 per day,
12
Virtual Factory Tours presented slides and/or videos that
mimicked an actual factory walk through virtually, without
10
physically being present at the factory. The EBL competi8
tion was conceptualized and organized by PELS under the
6
chairmanship of Prof. Deepak Divan from the Center for
4
Distributed Energy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.
GaN:
Zero QRR
2
The Virtual Factory Tours were organized by Dr. Ira J. Pitel
from Magna-Power Electronics, with help from Prof. Alex
0
Ron*QOSS Ron*QRR... Ron*EOSS Ron*QG
Huang of the University of Texas at Austin.
Following the five regional competitions in China, India,
GaN eMode (600 V)
SiC TMOS (650 V)
South
Africa, Spain, and the United States, 23 teams were
GaN Cascode (600 V) CoolMOS C7 (600 V)
selected
out of 450 teams from 70 countries to compete in
SiC DMOS (900 V)
the EBL global final at ECCE in Baltimore on Tuesday, 1
October. The US$100,000 grand prize winner of this comFIG 1 GaN, e-mode, 600-V devices offer the best figure of
petition was Solar Urja through Localization for Sustainmerit compared to that of Si and SiC devices when it comes to
ability (SoULS) from the Indian Institute of Technology
reverse recovery (turn-on) performance. (Source: Infineon
(IIT), Mumbai. SoULS is an initiative of IIT-Bombay. Its
Technologies; used with permission.)
key aspects are to achieve scale, speed,
and skill development through localization,
thus empowering local women as manuToday
facturers and entrepreneurs in energy
Today:
access, providing wealth creation within
* 6 × 500-V FREDFET, [1-RDS (on) = 1.7 Ω]
* 1 × Monolithic Driver IC
their communities, and helping millions
* 12 × 12-mm QFN Package
30-50 W
of school children and hundreds of communities enjoy the benefits of clean solar
lighting and energy.
Reduction in Package Cost of > 50%
An additional US$115,000 was shared
by four other winning teams, includ2025
ing Entrepreneurs du Monde and Okra
2025 Using GaN Generation 2
from Cambodia, Solar Worx from GerBOA + FOM + Monolithic:
many, Havenhill Synergy from Nigeria,
30-200 W
* 1 × Monolithic GaN Die [Six Switches of
and Reeddi from Canada/Nigeria, which
1-Ω RDS (on)]
was the winning student team. In a state* 1 × Monolithic Driver IC (New)
* Toll/Quad-Dpak Equivalent Package
ment, EBL Global Chair Prof. Divan
said, "getting 3 billion people to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
FIG 2 By 2025, according to Dr. Alain Charles, a lateral monolithic GaN die could
Development levels of energy use with
have the ability to integrate six GaN switches. QFN: quad-flat no-leads; BOA: bond
existing grid-extension strategies seems
over active; FOM: figure of merit; DPAK: Decawatt Package. (Source: Infineon
very expensive and could be catastrophic
Technologies; used with permission.)

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

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IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - December 2019

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