Advances in Power Electronics

Power electronics is seeing significant growth due to electrification of transport, and carbon reduction using renewable energy. Innovations in devices (e.g. wide bandgap materials such as Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride) provide the opportunity to design smaller power electronic systems that are highly efficient. A key to realizing these benefits is innovations in packaging and design tools. Traditional materials and packaging architectures need to address the new environments that they will be subjected to higher temperatures, frequencies, and inductances, etc. New design and modelling approaches will be required to support innovations in packaging and reliability predictions. This paper details some of the recent advances in power electronics systems and details some of the challenges that need to be overcome.