Mishra of UCSB ECE

Abstract: Gallium Nitride (GaN) is a material that does not exist in nature and along with alloys made by mixing it with Indium Nitride and/or Aluminum Nitride spans the spectrum from the infrared {InN (Eg (bandgap)0.7eV)} to the UV {AlN (Eg=6.2eV)}. This explains its applications form red-blue-green displays to solid state white lighting to UV emitters for sterilization applications as an examples. GaN also has remarkable electronic properties with electron mobilities greater than 2000 cm²V^-1s^-1 with attendant large charge densities. Its breakdown electric field is 3MV/cm which 10X that of Si. The ability of the material to simultaneously deliver large currents at high voltages with low dissipative resistance makes it a preferred RF power source from 1GHz to 130GHz (and beyond) and also the choice of delivering high frequency power conversion in compact form factors for laptop and mobile phone chargers, PV inverters, data server power supplies and EV chargers. This talk will cover these 3 domains of applications: a minimum 3 slices of pizza kinda talk.

Biography:

Bio: Umesh K. Mishra is the Richard A. Auhll Dean of the Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering, and the Donald W. Whittier Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. He received his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, his M.S from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA., and his Ph.D. in 1984 from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He has supervised 84 Ph.D theses to completion with 15 of them being women and 74 of them in the field of Gallium Nitride (GaN) materials and devices. He co-founded the first start-up in the world to commercialize RF GaN transistors and LEDs in 1996 (Nitres) which was acquired by CREE (now Wolfspeed) in 2000. Umesh co-founded Transphorm  in 2007 to commercialize GaN transistors for power conversion which was acquired by Renesas in 2024. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, an International Fellow of the Japanese Society of Applied Physics, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Kanpur. He has received several awards for developing GaN electronics including the IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Medal in 2022.