Abstract:

Over the next 25 years, solar and other renewables are projected to be the fastest-growing sources of new energy, electrified transportation will likely grow to dominate liquid fuel vehicles, and the electrical grid will (hopefully) grow to support embedded-distributed generation, storage, and intelligent end loads. Electronics will play a big role in this transition. Thanks to decades of exponential cost/performance scaling (i.e. Moore’s Law), transistors are now ubiquitous; embedded systems, sensors, processors, and communications are the new building blocks in the engineered world. The field of power electronics (electronics that manage energy) is experiencing a resurgence, the likes of which we have not seen since Edison and Tesla. This is motivated by the growth of renewables, efficient lighting, the fact that electrochemical storage will be the backbone of transportation and grid stability, and because power is now the limiting factor in our computing infrastructure and battery life of our precious mobile devices.

This talk will focus on research at the intersection of integrated (semiconductor) circuit design and power electronics. It will discuss how new circuit classes, based on resonant operation of switched-capacitor converters, can leverage high-level integration and recent innovations in active and passive components to achieve high efficiency and low cost in the mm³ regime. New opportunities such as capabilities for variable regulation and multi-mode operation will be discussed in light of the needs of modern electrochemical and photovoltaic applications.

Bio:

Jason Stauth received his B.A. in Physics from Colby College in ’99, his B.E. from Thayer in ’00, and his MS/PhD degree from U.C. Berkeley in 2008 where he studied high-frequency power electronics and RF power amplifiers. Previously, from 2000-2003, he was an IC designer at Allegro microsystems where he designed magnetic current sensors and a variety of analog/mixed signal products. From 2008-2011 he developed sub-module power converters for photovoltaic systems as founder and CTO of QVSense, Inc.  Since 2011 he has been an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College studying high-density and integrated DC-DC converters leveraging hybrid and resonant SC architectures. Dr. Stauth received the NSF Career Award in 2016.