Universal Smart Power Module (USPM) for Carbon Neutral Society

This article presents a Universal Smart Power Module (USPM) which responds instantaneously to fluctuating power sources such as solar and wind power and fully addresses the rapidly expanding renewable energy market by combining universality and smartness. USPM consists of a main circuit as an H-bridge converter, high-speed controller, gate driver, and EMI filter into one module. Conventional power electronics design requires complicated know-how and specialized skills such as circuit design, digital control, thermal design, and EMI. The USPM concept simplifies the power electronics design because this system realizes every power converter by a combination of several USPMs. The USPM system consists of the main controller and several USPMs. The main controller gives voltage and current commands to USPMs by wireless communication to regulate the operation of USPMs. USPM realizes excellent feedback control by the high-speed controller in order to follow the command from the main controller rapidly. The core power module using the wide-bandgap device in USPM is also developed to improve the switching characteristics and the power density of USPM. As the technology for ultra-miniaturization, ADB (Atomic Diffusion Bonding) is developed and applied to the drain side of the SiC-MOSFET to achieve low thermal resistance, and bumping technology to the source side of it to achieve low inductance. This article introduces the detail of the concept of the USPM systems and the core power module. Finally, the example of the USPM system for the PV power conditioner is demonstrated by the experiment.