Speaker: Ivana Kovacevic
Date: November 19th 2020 at 11am ET
Abstract: Wide Band Gap (WBG) power devices have the potential to provide a paradigm shift with respect to performance and energy efficiency compared to the mature silicon (Si) power devices. The fast switching capabilities and the material properties of WBG power devices make the system design more challenging, with respect to system integration, fast voltage and current slopes triggering the effects of parasitic inductive and capacitive couplings, high electromagnetic interference emission, and thermal couplings. These new design aspects imply a reformulation of design procedures developed for Si-based power electronics, which is required for successfully adapting WBG power devices. Automated system design is foreseen as a future of power electronics enabling optimal design solutions at minimal costs by considering dominant multi-physics design aspects.
The state-of-the-art multi-physics modeling approaches become computationally powerful, however not yet good enough for being fully integrated in an automated design process. The trade-off between accuracy and computational time has been an important challenge preventing virtual prototyping based.
Bio: Ivana Kovačević-Badstübner (M’16) received the Ph.D. degree from the ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, in 2012. From 2008 to 2015, she was with the Power Electronics Systems Laboratory, ETH Zurich, focusing on the prediction of electromagnetic behavior of power electronics systems based on the developed numerical techniques and the lifetime modeling of power semiconductor modules. In March 2016, she joined the Advanced Power Semiconductor Laboratory, ETH Zurich. Her research interests include novel packaging technologies for SiC power devices, the optimization of power module layout with respect to electromagnetic interference, and multi-domain modeling of power semiconductor devices and their modules.