NC State will be offering new graduate courses next fall in connection with Power America, a program funded by a $146 million contract awarded to NC State last January by the Next Generation Power Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute to be spent over the next five years.
The mission of Power America, located on Centennial Campus, is to develop advanced manufacturing processes that will enable large-scale production of wide-bandgap semiconductors, which allow electronic components to be smaller, faster and more efficient than semiconductors made from silicon.
WBG semiconductors are made of materials that can allow devises to operate at higher frequencies, temperatures and voltages than semiconductors made from materials such as silicon. These materials are used to produce electronic devices in a cheaper and more energy efficient way.
John Muth, deputy director of Power America, said Power America hopes to be self-sustaining by the end of the five years by growing the number of industry members, the number of projects that industry is doing and the number of projects the government gives to them which will provide future funding.
The courses will be centered on the new WBG semiconductor-based power electronic devices. Undergrad courses will also be offered, but will focus more on the circuits in WBG devices, according to Jayant Baliga, director of the Power Semiconductor Research Center.
“[Power America] is a wonderful opportunity [for students] to get into a new area of technology, but we shouldn’t just say that it’s just WBG semiconductors,” Baliga said. “There is a whole technological ecosystem around WBG technology. Lots of students can work on this.”
Long term, Power America hopes to make the cost of WBG-based power electronics comparable to silicon power electronic devices and to increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States, according to Muth.
The U.S. Department of Energy launched a competition in May 2013 for three new manufacturing innovation institutes which would be established to address the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., according to a Power America pamphlet.
NC State was chosen to be the prime contractor for Power America based on its strong track record running two successful National Science Foundation Engineering Research Centers: the FREEDM Systems Center and the ASSIST Center.
“The big picture here is that the population of the world is increasing, the amount of energy that is available is relatively finite, and we need to use energy more efficiently, and wide band gap semi-conductors let us do that,” Muth said.
Funding for the program was provided by a $70 million cooperative agreement with the Department of Energy, $60 million from industry partners around the country and $16 million from the State of North Carolina and its university system, according to the NC State website.
“Since the contract took effect on Dec. 1, what we’ve done is we’ve been working on the organization, management, getting things started,” Muth said. “We started about 20 projects on Feb. 1, with a large variety of companies and other faculty and universities.”
Baliga derived the formula, known as Baliga’s Figure of Merit, which provided the guidelines for choosing the optimum semiconductor material for high-frequency applications, according to Baliga’s research paper, which was initially published in 1989.
Power America is comprised of 18 energy sector leaders. Some, such as Durham-based lighting manufacturer Cree, have longstanding connections to NC State. Cree produced the materials that Baliga used to prove that his formula worked.
“Once it was shown to work well, a lot of other people started working on it in Japan and Europe, about half a dozen companies, and by 2005 had already made products out of this material,” Baliga said. “If America doesn’t do something all the production of this stuff will be done in Japan or Europe and all the jobs will go over there.”
Muth said that currently 20 percent of the systems which produce, control and convert energy into usable forms use WBG semiconductors. He said that by 2030 he expects 80 percent of those systems to have WBG semiconductors in them.
“What that means is that the WBG-based semiconductor market might grow at about 22 percent per year, so it’s going to be a rapidly growing industry,” Muth said.
During President Barack Obama’s visit to NC State last year, he commended the university for its research with WBG semiconductors.
