£2k award for accelerating use of GaN transistors
GaN Systems and UK's EPSRC Centre for Power Electronics set future power challenge
GaN Systems, a manufacturer of GaN power transistors and the EPSRC Centre for Power Electronics in the UK have announced a new competition open to all UK power electronics postgraduates.
To be known as the Geoff Haynes Future Power Challenge, the annual award will be worth £2,000 for the research paper or poster that makes the strongest contribution to the acceleration of the use of GaN transistors, in future power conversion or control applications.
The prize is established to mark the occasion of Geoff Haynes' recent retirement as a founder and VP of GaN Systems and is in recognition of his contribution to the company and the formative GaN power industry.
In the last year GaN Systems have introduced to production two families of GaNPX normally-off transistors housed in embedded, almost chip scale packages, optimised for low inductance and low thermal resistance. Now, to achieve their full value in production systems, key enabling issues still need to be addressed, according to the company.
Any paper or poster submitted to the Centre's 2016 Postgraduate Summer School to be held at the National College, Nottingham on the 1st and 2nd June 2016, that clearly identifies research relevant to accelerating the use of GaN components in applications with performance that can't be achieved using existing silicon technology, will qualify for entry.
The entries will be judges by a panel of academic and industrial experts and the prize will be awarded at the Annual Conference for the EPSRC Centre of Power Electronics on the 5th and 6th July 2016.
In view of the limited timescale and in order not to restrict entry of relevant work in pre-existing projects using SiC technology, that work will also qualify for entry where demonstration or simulation shows its relevance to a future GaN based solution. The judges will select a short list of projects for presentation at the event, from which the winner will be chosen.
Projects including elements of study of any of the following or related issues will qualify for entry:
- New or improved circuit configurations enabled by the unique operating characteristics of these transistors, leading to system-level benefits.
- New or improved digital control solutions for high frequency converters.
-Thermal management and packaging design for high density power converters.
-Improved inductor and capacitor technologies for energy storage in fast, high operating temperature converters.
-Study of failure mechanisms in GaN transistors, their control and their impact on system performance and reliability.
-Management of EMI in higher switching speed converters.
-Component choice, board layout and circuit design for fast switching systems.
-Measurement of currents and voltages in fast switching cells. (Even the introduction of a scope probe at a critical node can distort performance.)
-Modelling of the transistors and the new systems they enable.
-Advances in device fabrication technology or device design.
-Design of drivers for wide band-width switches.
-There's scope too to explore the impact of the characteristics of GaN devices on electrical machines able to benefit from faster switching.
Information on the EPSRC Centre for Power Electronics and its activities can be found at http://www.powerelectronics.ac.uk.
