The EU commission's “Green Deal” initiative aims for sustainable mobility and efficient use of resources. In HiEFFICIENT, the project partners worked towards these goals and developed next generation wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductors for smart mobility. To boost this development and the market introduction in automotive applications, the partners set ambitious goals to gain higher acceptance and achieve the maximum benefit in using WBG semiconductors:
1.) Reduction in Volume of 40 %, by means of integration on all levels (component-, subsystem- and system-level)
2.) Increase efficiency beyond 98 %, while reducing losses of up to 50 %
3.) Increase reliability of WBG power electronic system to ensure a lifetime improvement of up to 20 %
To accomplish the targeted goals, the partners worked on industrial use cases to demonstrate the key achievements. This includes, amongst others, modular inverters with different voltage levels (such as 48 V, 400 V), flexible on- and multi-use off-board chargers for different voltage levels, multi-purpose DC/DC converters and test systems for power electronics’ lifetime testing. These use cases are led by OEMs and other industrial partners, who defined requirements and specifications for the envisioned systems. The project work started at component-level, developing highly integrated GaN and SiC devices and was followed by multi-objective design optimization and virtual prototyping approaches. High integration means big challenges in thermal management, which have been addressed by the development of advanced cooling concepts, and modularity for the sake of maintainability and flexibility for future applications. Finally, the demonstrators were integrated in relevant environments to prove the concepts and the applicability for future use.
