Cornell Electron Devices Society (EDS) presents:

Yuhao Zhang
Virginia Tech

Multidimensional Devices: Reshaping the Power Electronics Landscape

Abstract
Power electronics technologies provide electrical energy conversion using semiconductor devices and passive components. The global power device market reaches US$40 billion and is rapidly expanding, driven by applications like electric vehicles, data centers, consumer electronics, electric grids, and renewable energy processing.

Power device advances are driven by materials and device architectures. In addition to using wide- or ultrawide-bandgap materials, multidimensional architectures – such as superjunctions, multi-channels, and multi-gates – can also improve device performance, regardless of the underlying material technology. These structures enable electrostatics engineering in additional dimensions and bring the benefits of geometrical scaling into power devices.

This talk presents our efforts in developing multidimensional power devices in gallium nitride (GaN), which have set several new records in power device performance and thus expanded the GaN’s application space from 10 V to 10 kV. These devices hold great potential for advancing the speed, efficiency, and form factor of power electronics systems, and some of them are currently being commercialized. Our work on packaging, thermal management, and device reliability/robustness evaluation will also be introduced, all of which are essential to exploiting the breakthrough device performance in power electronics systems.  

Bio
Dr. Yuhao Zhang is an assistant professor at the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES), the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech. He leads the power semiconductor research at CPES, one of the largest university-based power electronics research centers in the U.S. Before joining CPES in 2018, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2017 to 2018. He received his Ph. D. and S. M. in electrical engineering from MIT in 2017 and 2013, respectively. Before joining MIT, he received his B. S. in physics from Peking University in 2011. His research interest is at the intersection of power electronics, microelectronic devices, and advanced materials. He has authored over 100 journal papers (EDL, T-ED, T-PEL, Nature, Nature Electronics, etc.) and conference proceedings (IEDM, ISPSD, IRPS, APEC, etc.) and holds 5 granted U. S. patents. He received the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2017, the IEEE George Smith Award in 2019, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2021, the Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award of Virginia Tech Engineering in 2021, and the Faculty Fellow Award of Virginia Tech Engineering in 2022.