IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2019 - 67

Company Profile

by Philip Lessner

KEMET-100 Years of
Continued Innovation

t is an age-old question: Does
innovation drive markets, or do
market needs drive innovation?
In reality, the answer is probably
that both are true, and both ap proaches have been present in the
100-year history of KEMET. Hugh S.
Cooper (Figure 1), a chemist who
developed an alloy of beryllium and
aluminum known as Cooperite (valuable in the production of vacuum
tubes) started the company in 1919.
Cooper sold his related patents to
Union Carbide in October of that
year, which resulted in the forming
of KEMET (a combination of the
terms "chemical" and "metallurgical") Laboratories, a materials-driven part of Union Carbide that was
focused on extending the life of vacuum tubes. By 1927, its workforce
comprised nine employees, including
two chemists-one of whom was
Cooper-three engineers, and four
assistants. Today, KEMET has
15,000 employees and operates 23
manufacturing facilities.
In 1947, when the transistor came
along, KEMET saw the writing on
the wall for vacuum tubes and, by
the mid-1950s, had branched into
the business of tantalum capacitors,
commercializing the technology by
1958 (Figure 2). A decade later, it
added multilayer ceramic capacitors
(MLCCs) to a product portfolio that
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2019.2910717
Date of publication: 18 June 2019

FIG 1 KEMET founder Hugh S. Cooper.
(Source: Cooper family private collection; used with permission.)

continues to sustain the business
into the 21st century (Figure 3).
In the 1980s, manufacturing techniques became more automated with
the widespread deployment of automated pick and place. During this
time, much of KEMET's development
effort was focused on packaging technology, migrating capacitor packages
to surface-mount technology (SMT).
Since the late 1980s, the vast majority of capacitors has been supplied as
SMT, with leaded packages reserved
for just a few specialized applications.
The modern KEMET is fundamentally a materials company that is a
leader in capacitor technology. The
late 1990s saw a significant shift in

June 2019

the materials used in tantalum and
ceramic capacitors. The tantalum
capacitors were changed from using
manganese-dioxide cathodes to intrinsically conductive polymers, and
the ceramic capacitors were changed
from using precious metal electrodes
to base metal electrodes. KEMET has
successfully transitioned to these materials, and these product chemistries
are dominant today at the company as
well as in the industry as a whole. The
company's product offering continues
to evolve as new dielectric and materials chemistries are continuously introduced. In recent years, the product
offering has broadened significantly
and moved outside the realm of capacitors for the first time.
The automotive world has seen
dramatic technological advances in
recent years as vehicles now include
more technology than ever before,
especially in the areas of electric propulsion, in-vehicle infotainment, and
advanced driver-assistance systems.
Only a small proportion of vehicles
(<10%) currently use electric propulsion; however, this is expected to
grow rapidly. As the industry transitions from internal combustion to
hybrid to fully electric vehicles, the
increased need for electrical power
means higher battery voltages are
required to limit the currents in the
system. In addition, the power levels
are increasing as multikilowatt chargers aim to replenish vehicle batteries
in minutes instead of hours.
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IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2019

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