Power Electronics Europe February/March 2022

www.apec-conf.org/ APEC 2022 15 www.power-mag.com Issue 1 2022 Power Electronics Europe energy access challenges, benchmark existing solutions, highlight opportunities for the power electronics community, and present the engagement of the IEEE Power Electronics Society with energy access. Flagship initiatives are IEEE Empower a Billion Lives, a recurring global competition aimed at fostering innovation to develop technically, economically and socially viable energy access solutions and IEEE Global Energy Access Forum, a platform to facilitate multistakeholder engagement in discussions on how rapid technology developments, forward leaning policies and new financing mechanisms intersect and can accelerate the development and deployment of scalable solutions for energy access. Gideon van Zyl, Technical Fellow Advanced Energy, Fort Collins/USA, will talk about “Driving Plasma: Advancing Power Conversion in Critical Semi and Medical Applications”. Plasma processing is well established and known in semiconductor wafer manufacturing and for creating highly engineered coatings in advanced industrial applications. The ability to precisely power and drive plasma loads has also enabled electrosurgical applications. For the power electronics engineer, plasma loads present unique challenges, including wide swings in load impedance, the highly nonlinear and time- varying nature of the load, arcing, and the difficulty in precisely measuring and controlling power delivery. In the semiconductor industry, higher etch rate requirements for 3D memory devices result in ever-increasing power being applied to bias the workpiece. This results in severe modulation of the plasma impedance creating problems for other generators that are also coupled to the plasma load. In medical applications, where a small plasma is created at the tip of a powered electrosurgical probe to cut and ablate tissue, challenging plasma impedance variations create the same challenge for power delivery and control. We will show how advances in power electronics devices, circuits, and measurement and control are enabling advanced plasma processing. The “History of PSMA Power Technology Roadmap: from AAA TripTik to Google Maps” , will be revealed by Ritu Sodhi, PSMA Roadmap Committee, and Consultant Power Transistor R&D at ROHM. Our success as individuals, as companies, and as institutions, depends on anticipating and being equipped to deal with the future. To help the power electronics industry in this endeavor, PSMA published its first Power Technology Roadmap (PTR) in 1994 using a collaborative approach. A lot has changed since then in our will more and more help us, to build low loss and volume optimized magnetic components. John H. Scott, Principal Technologist – Power and Energy Storage NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate, will talk about “On the Moon to Stay: Challenges Presented to Power Electronics Technology by Sustained Operations on the Lunar Surface”. NASA’s Artemis Program seeks not only to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the 1970’s but also to provide the technological basis for infrastructure that will enable permanent and expanding scientific and industrial exploitation of the Lunar surface. The primary purpose of this infrastructure is to generate and distribute power to a diverse and growing range of scientific and industrial assets, and the keys to success for this function are power management and control circuits that are highly reliable and maintainable for a decade of operation in the extreme thermal, radiation, and dust environment of the Lunar surface. While various combinations of wide band gap semiconductors, electronic devices, circuit topologies, and shielding schemes have been successfully developed for mission environments ranging from low Earth orbit to the Jovian system, power management technology has not been optimized to meet the full combination of mission requirements for the Lunar surface. To accomplish this, NASA requests the dedicated focus of the power electronics industry. “Energy Access: Challenges, Opportunities, and our Contributions” , that is the subject of the third keynote to be given by Jelena Popovic, IEEE Empower a Billion Lives (EBL) II Vice-Chair and Associate Professor University of Twente/Netherlands and Liuchen Chang, IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) President and Professor Emeritus, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton/Canada. Ensuring universal, affordable and sustainable energy access is one of the biggest societal challenges of our time. Energy poverty has far reaching consequences on health, education and livelihoods for almost 1 billion people with no access to electricity and over 2 billion people with poor and unreliable access. Decentralized approaches, such as solar home systems and minigrids have emerged in response to the shortcomings of centralized grid extension, sparked start-up innovation and are increasingly being integrated in national electrification plans. However, affordability, scalability, quality, interoperability, business models, technology obsolescence and lifecycle sustainability remain challenges. This plenary talk will frame the Power Up – that is certainly the hope of APEC organizers at this year`s in-person event Photo: AS