IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2015 - 8

history could be traced back more than
40 years and that in the first 20 years
the development was rather slow, but
that activity picked up during the next
20 years and that the new industry
was well under way on a modest scale,
boasting installations up to 20 MW.
Therefore, power electronics is
now 110 years old, and if we assign a
25-30-year impact period per generation of engineers, then the young professionals and students belong to the
fifth generation, and my generation
would be the fourth. The first and second generations were a small, exclusive group, and their contribution was
to invent and investigate the primary
switch mode topologies for frequency
converters in drives, dc transformers, rectifiers, and inverters. They
were handicapped by the operational
lifetime and cost of the valve devices,
the only electronic switches that were
available at the time.

Power conversion was overshadowed by electromechanics for the
greater part of the previous century. Well-functioning and reliable
variable-speed, traction, and servo
systems could be built using cascaded induction motors, metadyne
dc machines, and Ward Leonard
systems. Electrical machines were
dominant, and many, maybe most,
research institutions did not anticipate the changes that power electronics would bring about. As I am writing
this column, the first steps are being
taken to refurbish my laboratory by
removing the 50-year-old machine
stations connected by a matrix power
board. It was a lab designed and
built in the 1960s for interconnecting machines, but this functionality
was hardly ever used. Simple electrical machines were good enough for
almost all applications if they were
combined with static power electron-

ics converters. Consequently, the
experimental workstations in our
lab were, with a few exceptions, only
used in stand-alone mode.
Our third generation of engineers
were the pioneers of power electronics. They figured out how to build
power electronics circuits for driving
machines and powering computers in
the period 1960-1985, and they succeeded in taming the beastly behavior of power semiconductor switches.
These heroes enabled the technology
shift, and now we are riding the wave
that they created.

Reference
[1] E. F. W. Alexanderson and E. L. Phillipi,
"History and the development of the electronic power converter," Trans. Amer. Inst. Elect.
Engineers, vol. 63, no. 9, pp. 654-657, Sept. 1944.

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IEEE PowEr ElEctronIcs MagazInE

z June 2015

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