Power Electronics in Serbia - a look backward on 20 symposiums

Power Electronics in Serbia has passed rapid development in the last 50 years. It was result of collaboration and synergy between research institutes, industry and academia in Serbia (former Yugoslavia), but also of enthusiasm and devotion of research teams all over the country. Significant production program in industry was put into manufacturing process, and extensive experience and know-how has been gained. Such great interest was motivation to researchers of the Institute Nikola Tesla from Belgrade and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts to establish in 1973 a national forum for exchange of scientific results, the Power Electronics conference. The conference started in Belgrade then it was organized in several major research centres of Yugoslavia, while finally sited in Novi Sad in 1995. Today it is a symposium, fully international, cosponsored by the IEEE with all papers included in the IEEE Xplore database and cited in the Web of Science, the Scopus and Google scholar. In this paper development of power electronics and main research results are followed as reflection of papers presented in the previous 20 Power Electronics conferences and symposiums. As huge number of papers has been presented, this overview will be devoted to progress of power electronics in Serbia, only. Theirs main researchers will be highlighted, as they made and are still making significant contribution to the Worlds' power electronics community.