CSA Catapult's power electronics laboratory is the country's most advanced and comprehensive development, test and validation facility for power electronics pioneers.
The Design Studio gives customers access to the industry’s most advanced and sophisticated software development tools for modelling the thermal and electrical behaviour of GaN or SiC devices, and to development engineers with world-class expertise in their use.
By modelling parameters such as response to transient voltage events, parasitic inductances and capacitances, and the spread and intensity of hot-spots, CSA Catapult enables power system designers to make informed decisions about architectures, devices and operating limits before making costly commitments to hardware development.
Tools
CSA Catapult’s Power Lab contains a unique combination of high performance power and thermal analysis instruments. It provides customers with more detailed and accurate measurements of actual device, module or board-level behaviour than can be acquired anywhere in the UK.
This suite of instruments enables CSA Catapult to provide customers with detailed data about the behaviour of an off-the-shelf transistor or other device, or of a custom module or system, under a range of operating conditions that the customer specifies.
Instruments
The Design Studio and Power Lab help customers to choose the right device and develop their power circuit with confidence.
In CSA Catapult’s Packaging Lab, hardware design engineers optimise the integration of components such as transistors, gate drivers, capacitors and current sensors into a complete, designed-for-manufacturing package. The lab also produces sample units for testing and prototyping purposes.
Equipment in the lab includes scanning acoustic microscopy and tomography instruments, internal physical inspection equipment, thermal shock testers, vibration testers, accelerated lifetime testers, and power cycling testers operating at up to 300kVA.
The Evaluation Lab can generate comprehensive reports on thermal resistance, environmental and lifetime tests, failure analyses, insulation tests and mechanical data. There is no more comprehensive suite of resources in the UK for validating whether a compound semiconductor-based system is ready for release to an end user.
Equipment
