ABSTRACT
Power conversion underlines almost every application that requires electrical power to function. While the complexity and the stages of the power conversion system behind these applications can be widely different, the basic building blocks are similar. Buck or boost to step down or step up the voltage levels, an inverter to transform a DC signal to AC signal, a power factor controller (PFC) to reduce the reactive power from the output, and rectifiers to convert AC to DC are few such building blocks. Solid-state electronic devices, in the form of diodes and transistors, are an integral part of these power converters and their role in power conversion is rapidly increasing to refine an existing or define a new functionality. Silicon (Si) has been the backbone of the semiconductor industry and enabled power electronics much like computational electronics. In the form of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) and its various adaptations, particularly CoolMOSFET [1,2], insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) [1], bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and diodes, Si has served the power electronics industry extremely well so far.
