PCIM 2025 attendance falls
The PCIM power Expo & Conference 2025 saw 16,500 visitors this week in Germany, down from 18,000 last year and the same as 2023.
The event in Nuremberg filled six halls for the first time with 685 exhibitors, 62% from outside Germany. The conference saw 433 presentations on the latest research topics for 818 attendees from 26 countries
“PCIM is much more than a conference – it offers space for dialog, international partnerships and innovative forms of collaboration across company boundaries,” said Thomas Neyer, Senior Vice President, Infineon Technologies.
- Infineon returns to JFETs for solid state power distribution
- 80V MOSFET for DC-DC power in AI servers
- News roundup from PCIM 2024
“Our company has been exhibiting here for 20 years for the simple reason that we think that PCIM is one of the most important exhibitions for power electronics in the world,” said Karim Zaibat, business manager of power equipment maker Cefem Industries in France. “We’ve checked fairs in other countries, but we’ve not found any equivalent to the PCIM. This Expo has a deep, uncompromising focus on power electronics. And even after 20 years, we continue to meet new contacts within the community whether customers, leads, suppliers or engineers.”
Cefem is working with the ESISAR School of Engineering at the Université Grenoble Alpes on an instrumented capacitor for power systems.
The CRONOS II project builds on work at CEA-Leti in Grenoble to develop a connected capacitor capable of monitoring its remaining lifespan and transmitting this information periodically. This feature enables preventive replacement, reducing failure risks and facilitating the recycling of components before they deteriorate significantly.
The prototype capacitor will include an embedded system to calculate the remaining lifespan as well as secure data communication via wired or wireless options, taking into consideration industrial constraints, such as electromagnetic disturbances and challenging environmental conditions.
Key trends for the show includes improving energy efficiency, particularly with the proposed closure of the Energy Star programme in the US, as well as system integration for intelligent power modules and the increased use of new semiconductor materials such as gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC).
- NoMiS Power shows 1200V CiS MOSFET
- 1700V switcher saves space in 800V EVs
- 1200V SiC MOSFET for high power AI designs
The international advisory board of the conference, chaired by Prof. Leo Lorenz of the European Centre for Power Electronics (ECPE) in Nuremberg, selected three award-winning papers from more than 450 submissions.
A low-loss active gate driver with surge voltage detection for SiC MOSFET from Hironori Akiyama of MIRISE Technologies, Japan, uses a new method to improve the trade-off between switching loss and surge voltage. This can control the surge voltage to a constant level by detecting the surge voltage and adjusting the gate current. This reduces the switching loss with increasing the switching speed until the surge voltage approaches the limit. Experimental results demonstrate that surge voltage can be controlled, leading to a reduction in switching loss by 36 % to 52 %.
Michael Basler of Fraunhofer IAF in Germany developed a highly-integrated monolithic GaN bidirectional switch (MBDS) with blocking voltage beyond 1200 V. The GaN power IC also includes two intrinsic free-wheeling diodes for an improved single-gate self-control characteristic, two integrated gate drivers, current sense-FET, temperature sensor, and substrate network in case the design is realized in a GaN-on-Si technology.
AT ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, Bastian Korthauer proposes the use of semiconductive materials in the manufacturing of coil formers for medium-frequency transformers. By employing these materials, the common mode component of the electric field – introduced by the series connection of converter modules on the medium voltage side – can be effectively shielded, enabling a significantly simplified insulation design. The proposed concept was validated through FEM simulation and breakdown experiments.
The Young Engineer Award was presented to Martin Schiestl from Infineon Technologies, Austria, for a highly integrated high power density design of a 1kW motor drive using an integrated GaN power stage as well as a novel current sensor. These were combined with the latest Infineon microcontroller to achieve a power density of 3.3kW/in3 at switching frequency of 100kHz for e-bikes, scooters, robotics and power tools.
The Young Researcher Award went to Lena Köhler of Fraunhofer IISB, Germany, with her paper using machine learning and digital twins to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of solid state circuit breakers. This used a new approach with a digital twin enabling digital services for failure indicator-based RUL estimation of DC semiconductor circuit breakers. This then leads to a novel setup for testing the new services with real world mission profiles.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
