One of the big challenges that our society will have to face over the next decade is related to energy issues. Worldwide, most of the energy is consumed into transports and buildings, both residential and industrial, thus resulting in a significant increase in CO2 emissions and in global warming. The majority of this energy is generated by non-renewable and non-environmentally friendly coal, fossil fuel and natural gas.
In the objective of a sustainable development, the widespread of alternative energy sources in transportation and buildings is the solution that will require a major paradigm shift in the power industry. Transports will become more electrically driven thus demanding for new generations of power devices and converters. For a large penetration of renewable energies, it is more appropriate to move from a centralized generation approach to a distributed one, especially for photovoltaic energy.
These evolutions require an efficient management of the resources, storage and use of energy, strongly depending on the performance of integrated power devices and systems. In addition to the improvement of the conversion efficiency of such systems, other important challenges are the required miniaturization, the evolution towards intelligent and autonomous power systems, with an increased reliability and robustness.
To tackle these energy challenges, ISGE research team has focused its scientific approaches on the integration of systems enabling a function of electrical power conversion both efficient and reliable. These studies are carried out in LAAS technology Platform to implement 3D approaches issued from advanced microtechnologies (trenches, double-side lithography…) and introduce new materials, either into the silicon process (magnetic materials, high-K dielectrics, BCB), or as the starting semiconductor material (GaN, diamond). To this aim, the research activities are organized in five topics that are complementary and strongly interdependent: