Emerging (Ultra-) Wide Bandgap Power Devices on the Horizon-Slides

Abstract: In the last decade, the power electronics landscape has been reshaped with the production and application of power devices based on wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductors, such as gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC). Besides advancing the performance of traditional power systems, WBG devices have also enabled many emerging applications that are beyond the realm of silicon (Si) as well as changed the manufacturing paradigm of power electronics.
This talk will present the development of next-generation WBG and ultra-wide-bandgap (UWBG) power devices as well as the switching-based ruggedness study of WBG devices. We recently developed a group of novel 1.2 kV GaN devices based on the vertical architecture, which have shown great promise to expand the application space of GaN into the medium-voltage realm. Besides GaN, our work on an emerging UWBG material, gallium oxide, has suggested new enabling capabilities of UWBG power devices for high-temperature applications. Finally, we will present our robustness study of WBG power devices, with an emphasis on new degradation mechanisms and device physics unveiled from the avalanche tests of GaN HEMTs and hard-switching-based accelerated tests of SiC MOSFETs.