The Power electronics team (PEATER) in the School of Engineering at Warwick is led by Professor Phil Mawby.
The new chamber is part of a suite of equipment that’s been funded through Driving the Electric Revolution (DER) as part of its main centres of expertise initiative. The chamber will support state of the art research and development in Wide-Bandgap semiconductor technologies under the area of Power Electronics Machines and Drives (PEMD).
This new tranche of equipment augments a well-established cleanroom for dice processing as well as an epitaxy capability for Silicon Carbide.
The ARS 060680 ultra-fast rate environmental stress chamber has a temperature and humidity range of +10 to +95°C/10 to 98 %rh with a refresh rate of 15K/min and will be used to stress the semiconductors and Invertors specifically for automotive applications.
Commenting Professor Mawby said, “We wanted a chamber that provided us with maximum flexibility, allowing us to undertake a multitude of tests including high and low temperature storage, thermal cycling and temperature and humidity stress testing.”
The emphasis at PEATER is to develop a facility for reliability and testing of assemble power devices, modules and assemblies. Industry already has access to these facilities and PEATER are providing both the expertise and facilities to evaluate new ideas, assemblies, and integrations for use in the fast-growing automotive sector.
PEATER at Warwick carries out work in electrical energy conversion, from the very small power (mW) levels to very high-power levels (MW). This technology centres on the developments in semiconductor switching devices.
The developments in MOSFET ((Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) and IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor) technologies have paved the way for new applications such as hybrid vehicles, electric aircraft, electric ship propulsion, wind turbines as well as the revolution in mobile phone and computing devices, where energy management is critical to all these applications.
