Humans of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Wenbo Wang
The consistent demand on power electronics systems with improved performances cannot be fulfilled with the mature and well-established Si technology anymore
Ph.D. Candidate Wenbo Wang will defend his Ph.D. research on October 19 with his thesis Electromagnetic Design of High Frequency PFC Boost Converters using Gallium Nitride Devices. Wenbo was supervised by Professor Bram Ferreira and Dr. Jelena Popovic (Electrical Sustainable Energy).
Wenbo: “I have been working on a new type of power semiconductors. For over 40 years semiconductors were made from silicon. And silicon semiconductors has reached their limits after so many years' improvements and optimization. The new type of semiconductors, when compared with Silicon ones, can operate at high temperature, high voltage and high frequency conditions. And performance of power electronics devices that use this new semiconductor can be greatly improved. For example your laptop adaptor, can be made smaller and, at the same time, more energy can be saved as efficiency could be higher. Since 2009 there has been a slow shift into using gallium nitride instead of silicon, which is where my research is based on. It saves energy and has a higher efficiency. My thesis deals with exploration of high frequency operation potentials of GaN power semiconductors through device behaviour modelling of GaN transistors to reveal high frequency limitations of the devices, accommodating the semiconductors accordingly with identified optimal topology and operation mode and demonstrating the high frequency capacities of the new technology in a real application. The consistent demand on power electronics systems with improved performances cannot be fulfilled with the mature and well-established Si technology anymore.”
