What's up in Power Conversion for the Smart Grid

The ugly truth is that over 10% of the electricity in the generated in the US is wasted in converting power from the form in which it is delivered to the form necessary to be consumed. Power conversion is ubiquitous from laptop adapters to dataserver power supplies, Photovoltaic and hybrid car inverters to motor drives. Silicon has served the power function extremely well but has reached its materials limits. Wideband gap semiconductors are seen as the way that progress can be maintained and this tremendous loss in energy be reduced significantly. The impact is not only economic (over $40B in annual electricity savings), or environmental (equivalent of 300 coal fired power plants worth of energy) but critical for new systems architectures which, as in so many aspects of electronics, are determined primarily by thermal management. Low loss elements are also critical for determining the best hardware implementation of the final smart grid solution.
In this talk progress in Gallium Nitride based power conversion will be described along with its status and future prospects. Not much heat will be generated.

Speaker: Umesh Mishra, UC Santa Barbara

HP Auditorium