European Perspective

PowerizeD focuses on intelligence in power electronics and thus want to contribute to the decarbonization of European society and the protection of our climate. 62 research partners from 13 European countries are involved in the major European project with an overall volume of 72 million euros. PowerizeD addresses a new level of technology and relies increasingly on the digitalization of power applications. Infineon Technologies AG initiated the project, is an active participant with several corporate divisions and is also the overall project coordinator.

Application areas

The project partners are focusing on applications from the fields energy and mobility. 17 demonstrator paths are concerned among other things with improvement of drives for the rail industry, charging systems for the automotive industry, liquid batteries for the energy industry as well as drives for the manufacturing industries. The research partners will take an interdisciplinary approach with topics including modeling and Digital Twin, Federated Learning that is lead by RISE, as well as reliability and sustainability.

Objectives

The newly developed key technologies are to be realized and demonstrated in concrete form, and are to be evaluated in terms of a large number of universally applicable results. 
The immediate project objectives include:
• Reduction of power loss in power conversion by 25 percent
• Extension of the service lives of devices and systems by 30 percent
• Reduction of chip size by at least 10 percent
• Shortening development times by a challenging 50 percent

Power electronics convert electrical energy, and it is found in most modern electronic products, from computers to electric cars. For example, it makes your cellphone faster, more compact, and it makes the battery life lasts longer. It also enables your electric car to distribute the right current and voltage to the electric motors.

To achieve a green transition and at the same time meet the increased need for electrical energy, more efficient energy conversion is required. The project Future Power Electronics is a new initiative to build competence and lab resources to meet the industry’s future challenges within power electronics. The goal is to contribute with knowledge and a test operation for Swedish products and companies to achieve increased competitiveness in the global market.

New demo facility to develop Future Power Electronics

Future Power Electronics will be developed within a new test and demo lab that is expected to be completed in the spring of 2023. The lab is a complement to the large electromobility lab SEEL. Within the new lab, RISE will perform testing and verification, from chip to subsystem and system level. The project will primarily focus on verifying new materials, construction methods, and AI-based methods for forecasting error outcomes as well as new methods for control and optimization of power electronics.

The Future Power Electronics initiative faces three challenges:

1. More energy-efficient power transmission with SiC and GaN materials

An important part of the transition to a climate-neutral society is to be able to reduce losses in the conversion of electrical energy. More energy is wasted with today's, often silicon-based (Si), power electronics compared to new materials. Within the demo facility, RISE will further develop power electronics based on more efficient and advanced wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductor materials, such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN). This will lead to more energy- and cost-efficient components, which in turn will lead to for example shorter charging time and a longer range for electric vehicles.

2. Increased effect density with new design and 3D printing

In order for power electronics of the future to be more energy-efficient, the power density needs to increase, meaning more current per volume in the systems. To get there, new materials and methods for design are required. Within the project, we will use new ways of building power electronics. For example, 3D printing, also called additive manufacturing, which has great potential to optimize the volume and function of power electronics systems. The challenge in an additive manufacturing process is to combine materials that can conduct a lot of current with materials that can insulate against high voltage.

3. Increased reliability with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The power electronics of the future will be more complex and integrated than they are today. This will make it more difficult to ensure adequate reliability, meaning that the systems will work as planned for as long as planned. By developing new, AI-based methods, combined with an understanding of the most important error mechanisms, it will be possible to predict error outcomes in the systems before they occur.

Emerging WBG semiconductors hold the potential to revolutionize the electronics world nowadays. The most mature and developed WBG materials to date are silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), which possess bandgaps of 3.3 eV and 3.4 eV respectively, whereas silicon(Si) has a bandgap of 1.1 eV. The WBG materials enable high breakdown voltage, high thermal conductivity, and radiation resistance ability, which is superior to Si for many applications, such as 5G/6G network, autonomous vehicles, power converters in energy and power systems, as well biochemical sensors in special scenarios.

A constant demand exists to improve these types of devices for system stability and reliability, for both defense and security, and for industrial applications. RISE has continuously worked on the improvement of the WGB-based electronic/photonic devices to enable them to operate in harsh environments: extremely high or low temperature variations, strong laser illumination, as well as x-ray and proton radiation conditions. The goal of this grant is to support the collaboration between RISE and U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to perform radiation testing on WBG semiconductor-based devices by investigating the single event effects in these devices, for instance GaN-based HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors), as illustrated in the image above.

X-ray analysis is important in many applications, such as medical technology, food safety, materials testing and particle physics.

Today, digital detectors are often used instead of traditional photographic films. But with digital detectors, which are rigid instead of flexible, it is difficult to make a detailed analysis of three-dimensional objects because the geometry is distorted when the measurement does not take place on the surface.

This project developed methods and systems to provide digital X-ray detectors that are flexible. A new type of scintillating optical fiber was combined with shape sensing systems, photomultipliers and ultra-fast electronics to create detector surfaces.

Experts in fiber optics, measurement technology and electronics participated from RISE. Our focus was on scintillating fiber arrays. 

RISE publications from the project

• "Flexible Liquid-Filled Scintillating Fibers for X-Ray Detection", M. Lindblom, M. Patzauer, U. Vogt, S. Wilbur, N. Safari Yazd, K. Hey Tow, W. Margulis, Å. Claesson, S-C. Ebenhag. IEEE SENSORS, Conference proceedings (Nov 2023) DOI. 
• "Flexible X-ray imaging detectors using scintillating fibers", S. Wilbur, C. Anastopoulos, M. Angelmahr, G. Asfis, J. Koch, M. Lindblom, K. Lohwasser, W. Margulis. Journal of Instrumentation, 17 (10) 2022. DOI.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 899634. The project runs within the 'Future emerging technologies' program.