Emerging Power Electronic Devices

The ongoing electrification of society has elevated the importance of electric transportation, renewable energy distribution, and data centers. It has also put new demands on the technologies -- called power electronics -- that control, interface, and transmit the electrical energy that powers our lives.

Today, power electronics typically rely on relatively inefficient silicon power devices and associated systems for switching, amplification, AC/DC conversion, and other purposes. The fundamental physical properties of silicon limit further improvements in efficiency and power handling capacity.

The growing ubiquity of power electronics has renewed focus on efforts to improve a class of immature electronic materials: wide and ultra-wide bandgap ((U)WBG) semiconductors. The wider bandgaps in these emerging devices provide a pathway for higher power handling and faster charging at greater overall efficiency. Collectively, adoption of this technology has the potential for substantial overall energy savings in the aggregate.

However, WBG and UWBG platforms are still immature and inadequately characterized so far. NIST's Emerging Power Electronic Devices program is developing unique measurement instrumentation and methodology to quantify the salient physical properties of these materials and devices to characterize their potential for practical high power handling applications.

In this program, specific emphasis is given to establishing critical links between specific morphological and intrinsic defects (chemical bonding errors) and overall power device performance and reliability. Moreover, many of the power electronics applications introduce extreme reliability requirements (zero failures in 10+ years) which demand the creation of new metrologies for assessment and mitigation.

These innovative measurements are key drivers to mature these (U)WBG materials for more widespread adoption and overall energy savings -- which can reduce the need for fossil-fuel based energy generation.