News: Microelectronics
7 February 2023
European project PowerizeD kicked off, targeting intelligent power electronics
The European research initiative PowerizeD has been kicked-off with a meeting of over 100 representatives from 39 companies and 23 research institutions – comprising 62 research partners from 13 European countries – at the headquarters of the project’s initiator and coordinator Infineon Technologies AG in Munich, Germany, which is an active participant via several corporate divisions.
Relying on the digitalization of power applications, PowerizeD aims to take the sustainability and resilience of the European energy chain, from generation to application, to a new level and strengthen Europe’s technological sovereignty.
Lasting three years until December 2025, the European Union is funding PowerizeD with about €18m as part of the joint program for digital key technologies (Key Digital Technologies Joint Undertaking, KDT JU) in its Digital Agenda. The amount will be matched by funding from the national governments of the respective countries involved, making total funding of €72m. The subsidies from Germany are being provided by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
“We have to make highly efficient use of energy if we are to achieve net-zero climate protection goals. Digitalization can help here as a highly decisive lever for more energy efficiency,” says Infineon’s chief digital transformation officer Constanze Hufenbecher. “We are pleased to be able to combine our strengths with the strengths of so many excellent partners from research and business,” she adds.
“Power electronics is key to the energy transformation and is used anywhere and everywhere that electricity is generated, transferred and used efficiently,” says Infineon’s chief operations officer Dr Rutger Wijburg. “The broad spectrum of power electronics applications makes it very important that we collaborate with partners across the boundaries of corporate entities and organizations to jointly advance Europe as innovation engine.”
The project partners are focusing on applications from the fields of energy and mobility. 17 demonstrator paths are concerned with, among other things, the improvement of drives for the rail industry, charging systems for the automotive industry, liquid batteries for the energy industry, and drives for manufacturing industries. The research partners will take an interdisciplinary approach, with topics including modeling and Digital Twin, Federated Learning, and reliability and sustainability.
The newly developed key technologies are to be realized and demonstrated in concrete form, and are to be evaluated in terms of a large number of universally applicable results. The immediate project objectives include:
- reducing power loss in power conversion by 25%;
- extending the service lives of devices and systems by 30%;
- reducing chip size by at least 10%;
- shortening development times by a challenging 50%.
PowerizeD aims to increase the degree of mechanical and electrical integration of control, driver and switching functionalities in components and to advance the integrated optimization of all power switch functionalities, independent of the semiconductor material used. New switching topologies and advanced control strategies involving the application of artificial intelligence are targeted at improving efficient, robust and reliable operations even further.
