Power electronics
Power electronics is the “enabling infrastructure technology” that promotes the conversion of electrical power from its raw form to the form needed by machines, motors and electronic equipments.
Advances in power electronics can reduce power conversion losses and increase the energy efficiency of equipments and processes that use electrical power, resulting in improved product quality and industrial productivity and yielding significant economic, environmental, and social benefits.
Challenges
High-efficiency and high-power-density converters have been identified as one of the key challenges to achieving increased economic growth with minimal environmental impact.
The Power Electronics roadmap highlights the importance of developing high-performance magnetic components for high switching frequency power applications.
Today’s power converters operate at low switching frequency, which means they must be large in size compared to other electronic devices. Increasing switching frequency can reduce the size, but at the cost of lower power efficiency. It is magnetic components such as inductors and transformers that are the primary constraints.
In relation to emerging technologies, the roadmap stressed that “innovations in magnetics have always been a challenge for the power electronics designer”, but “magnetics needs a significant change in the future”.
Aim
The overall objective of the project is to design and develop novel magnetics technologies within conductor materials, nanogranular magnetic materials and component integration that, together with a new winding pattern technique, will enable creation of power converters with unprecedented power-efficiency and power-density.
Ouyang and his team aim specifically at the development of efficient, integrated magnetic components suitable for voltage regulator modules (VRM) in high performance computing systems.
Ouyang states: "We expect to demonstrate a new VRM converter, with a power density 50 times higher than the power density in today’s VRM products, and a peak power efficiency 5% more than today’s VRM products, equivalent to saving ~50 GW on a global scale.
