Guest Editorial: Special Section on Modeling, Design, and Application of Next-Generation Power Components

Abstract

Power electronics, characterized by impressive technology advancement over the last two decades, has become a more complex and multidisciplinary research field. Power semiconductor devices, passive components and power conversion systems are undergoing significant performance improvement, but meanwhile facing challenges in efficiency, flexibility and reliability. While new wide-bandgap semiconductor devices are now establishing new efficiency and switching speed standards in the market, silicon power devices keep improving in terms of both manufacturing technology, package materials and design. Both call for new modeling methods and design efforts at device, component, and system levels, in order to accurately predict device characteristics, losses, EMI, hence allow design of power conversion systems with more precise margins. Furthermore, there is a lack of understanding of new phenomena and failure mechanisms associated with the new component technologies. From a system point of view, condition monitoring for high reliability is nowadays a musthave part in the overall application development process, demanding accurate and trustable models.