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WiPDA Workshop, Oct. 13-15

The second IEEE workshop on wide bandgap power devices and applications (WiPDA) was held in Knoxville from Oct. 13 -15, 2014. More than 100 attendees from universities, research centers, and industry attended the workshop. Companies that participated in this workshop included: ABB, APEI, Avogy, Booz Allen Hamilton, Clinch, Cree, Caterpillar, Dow Corning Corporation, Epiluvac, EPRI, Exide Technologies, Ford, GE, International Rectifier, Monolith Semiconductor, Nippon Chemi-Con Corporation, NREL, On Semiconductor, NRL, ORNL, PowerRox LLC, ROHM, Sandia National Laboratory, Texas Instruments, Toyota North America, Transphorm, United Silicon Carbide and UTRC. Topics in the workshop included the development of GaN and SiC power electronic devices and the application of these devices for high efficiency and/or high temperature applications.  Several faculty and students were part of the organizing committee for the workshop. Dr. Fred Wang served as treasurer for the workshop; Dr. Daniel Costinett served as local activities chair; and Dr. Leon Tolbert and Yutian Cui were responsible for the webpage, registration and publication of the conference proceedings.  CURENT faculty also served as session chairs for the keynote speakers and Zheyu Zhang, Weimin Zhang and Edward Jones made presentations during the Workshop. Students from CURENT’s power electronics group worked as volunteers during the workshop by doing registration, providing transportation, audiovisual and handling of questions. A lab tour was held in Min Kao building on Oct. 14 after the reception banquet at Neyland Stadium where attendees discussed with students in various research areas including wide bandgap power devices and took part in a demo of CURENT’s hardware testbed.  

 

Attendees during the panel session.

WiPDA_Panel_2014_sm.jpg

anel guest speakers from GE Aviation, Caterpillar, International Rectifier, CREE and DOE.