[Abstract] In use broadly from laptop adapters, solar inverters to motor drives for electric vehicles, power semiconductors are essential to modern life. GaN grown on Si substrate has been heavily pursued as an economically viable solution to future needs beyond Si devices. However developers encountered tremendous technology barriers in device demonstration, let along reliability. This seminar covers the status of recent success in developing 600V GaN-on-Si power devices as commercial product for real-world applications. Topics to cover include GaN’s physical advantages as a power semiconductor, device configuration as a robust product, device properties, switching behavior, and application examples in traditional and innovative circuit topologies.

[Biography] Dr. Yifeng Wu received his BE degree from Tsinghua University in 1985 and his Ph.D. degree from UC Santa Barbara in 1997.  He served as a lead scientist in GaN microwave and millimeter-wave power devices at WideGap Technology LLC and Cree Inc. for 11 years.  He joined Transphorm Inc. in 2008 and is now Sr. V.P. of Engineering.
        Dr. Wu has made sustained contribution to GaN power Electronics with work spanning from basic device process development to cutting-edge device designs, from millimeter-wave power HEMTs to kV high-efficiency power switches. He demonstrated the first GaN microwave power transistor [EDL 1996] and multiple times extended the record of the highest power density of a solid-state transistor [EDL 1998, IEDM 1999, EDL 2004, DRC 2006]. He led an engineering team to successfully qualify industry’s first 600V GaN-on-Si power transistors [WiPDA 2013] and develop true kV-class GaN transistors exceeding SiC performance [TPE 2014]. He holds 69 US patents and has authored high-impact papers resulting in >6000 citations in Google Scholar [http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=j07CdboAAAAJ&pagesize=100&view_op=list_works]