Welcome to POWERlab@EPFL

Research

Our mission is to innovate semiconductor devices with nanoscale design of high-performance materials to exploit their unique properties and conceive new, drastically more efficient devices that outperform the state-of-the-art.

Research Topics

POWERlab Highlights

Our work on the concept of electronic metadevices has just been published in the journal Nature. We demonstrated GaN devices presenting cutoff frequency figure-of-merit well beyond ten terahertz, record high conductance values, extremely high breakdown voltages and picosecond switching speeds. The devices operate on the basis of electrostatic control of collective electromagnetic interactions at deep subwavelength scales, as an alternative to controlling the flow of electrons in traditional devices, which resulted in extraordinary electronic properties. Congratulations Mohammad!

Luca Nela was selected for his outstanding thesis, New Technologies to Enhance the Figures-of-Merit of GaN Power Devices, which was supervised by Elison Matioli in the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research lab (POWERlab) in the School of Engineering (STI).

This annual prize, awarded for the first time in 2022, is given to the author of the most outstanding PhD thesis in the field of Microsystems & Microelectronics, and constitutes the EDMI’s highest recognition. The award consists of a certificate and of a CHF 3,000 prize, jointly funded by the Institute of Electrical and Micro Engineering (IEM) and by STI. Congratulations Luca!

The EPFL School of Engineering’s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab), headed by professor Elison Matioli, has received the selective 2021 IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics Prize Letter Award, for their paper entitled High-Accuracy Calibration-Free Calorimeter for the Measurement of Low Power Losses authored by Armin Jafari et al. and published on IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (TPEL). Congratulations Armin and the entire team!

© 2022 EPFL

Vanadium oxide is well known to alter its atomic arrangement at high temperatures, and change from insulating to conducting behavior. In this paper, we show that its structure also carries memory, in the form of structural states rather than electronic. These states can be arbitrarily manipulated on short time scales and tracked beyond hours after excitation (exhibiting similar features to glasses). These glass-like functional devices provide a novel scheme for data storage and processing, and could offer a route to neuromorphic computation and multi-level memories. This work has just been published in nature electronics. Congratulations Mohammad and the entire team!

PhD Award given at the Swiss NanoConvention in 2021. Congratulations Luca!

The paper entitled “High-Performance Enhancement-Mode AlGaN/GaN Multi-Channel Power Transistors” presented by Luca Nela has received the Charitat Award at the 33rd International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs (ISPSD 2021), held in Nagoya, Japan. This is the second Charitat Award in a row for Luca. Congratulations!!!

Our paper on multichannel nanowire power devices was published in Nature electronics. Congratulations Luca and the entire team!

Our paper on embedded microchannel cooling was published in Nature and featured in many news outlets: 
Scientific AmericanLe FigaroLe TempsNRCIEEE SpectrumNew ScientistNature podcastOlhar DigitalRTS

Congratulations Remco and the entire team!

Our work on nanoplasma devices for ultra-fast electronics published in Nature was featured in Nature podcast [link]. Congratulations Mohammad and the entire team!

Awarded to Armin Jafari for the best paper at the IEEE 9th International Power Electronics and Motion Control Conference (IPEMC2020 ECCE Asia). Congratulations Armin!

Awarded to Elison Matioli for the development of Nanoscale devices for large-scale challenges: from efficient power electronics to bridging the terahertz gap [link]

Awarded to Jun Ma for the best PhD thesis in 2020 in the EDMI doctoral program. Congratulations Jun!

Awarded to Kerim Yildirim for the best master thesis in the fields of physics, electrical and mechanical engineering at EPFL. Congratulations Kerim!

Awarded to Remco van Erp at the 2020 International Workshop on Thermal Investigations of ICs and Systems (Therminic). Congratulations Remco!

Awarded to Luca Nela, as the first author and presenter of the best paper at the International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs. Congratulations Luca!

Awarded to Remco van Erp at the 2020 IEEE Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems conference. Congratulations Remco!

Awarded to Georgios Kampitsis to move to Imperial College in the UK. Congratulations George!

Awarded to Remco van Erp at the IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference 2019, CA, USA. Congratulations Remco!

Latest publications

Accurate Measurement of Dynamic ON-Resistance in GaN Transistors at Steady-State

H. Zhu; E. Matioli 

IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. 2023-04-20. DOI : 10.1109/TPEL.2023.3268890.

Enablers for Overcurrent Capability of Silicon-Carbide-Based Power Converters: An Overview

S. Bhadoria; F. Dijkhuizen; R. Raj; X. Wang; Q. Xu et al. 

Ieee Transactions On Power Electronics. 2023-03-01. Vol. 38, num. 3, p. 3569-3589. DOI : 10.1109/TPEL.2022.3223730.

Electronic metadevices for terahertz applications

M. S. Nikoo; E. Matioli 

Nature. 2023-02-16. Vol. 614, num. 7948, p. 451-+. DOI : 10.1038/s41586-022-05595-z.

Measurement of WBG-based power supplies

H. Zhu; A. Jafari; K. Machtinger; M. Makoschitz; E. Matioli 

2023-01-01. 25th European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications (EPE ECCE Europe), Aalborg, DENMARK, SEP 04-08, 2023.

Switching losses in power devices: From dynamic on resistance to output capacitance hysteresis

E. Matioli; H. Zhu; N. Perera; M. S. Nikoo; A. Jafari et al. 

2023-01-01. 25th European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications (EPE ECCE Europe), Aalborg, DENMARK, SEP 04-08, 2023.

All publications

Funding

Thank you to all funding sources that enable our research!

Thank you to all funding sources that enable our research!