Wide Bandgap Material and Devices for Power, Energy, and Harsh Environment Sensing

Ayden Maralani, UC San Diego

March 17, 2016, 2:00 - 3:00pm, EBUII 479

Abstract:  With silicon material and devices pushed to their limits, wide bandgap materials and devices are setting new standards in power savings and efficiency for virtually everything that converts or uses electricity from wind turbines and solar installations, to industrial data centers, and hybrid vehicles. Thanks to the superior properties of the wide bandgap materials such as Silicon Carbide (SiC) and Gallium Nitride (GaN) that have both high voltage and high temperature capabilities. Speaking of high temperature, wide bandgap semiconductor devices and circuits are capable to function and survive at temperatures up to 600 °C where silicon counterparts are limited to 200 °C. Developing sensors to obtain information form harsh environments such as inside the aircraft engines, gas turbines, and oil wells could improve efficiency of the systems and save millions of dollars. In this seminar, applications of the wide bandgap material (SiC in particular) and devices along with our group’s progresses in developing harsh environment sensing systems will be discussed. These sensing systems include MEMS and semiconductor devices and circuits for signal conditioning. As a future work, the advantages of utilizing our developed components for energy research and radiation detection applications will be studied.

Bio:  Ayden Maralani is currently an Assistant Project Scientist within the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, San Diego. Since 2011, he has been working with the Dean and Professor Albert P. Pisano conducting research and developing wide bandgap semiconductor devices and circuits for power, energy, and harsh environment sensing applications. He has started this work at University of California, Berkeley and been continuing it at UC San Diego, since 2014. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University in 2009. Prior to joining University of California, he has held design engineer positions with the I/O Center of Excellence group of Cypress Semiconductor and Semisouth Laboratories.