Cornell-led Team Creates Gallium Nitride Power Diode

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“Our results are an important step toward understanding the intrinsic properties and the true potential of GaN,” said Zongyang Hu, a Cornell postdoctoral associate and the paper’s co-lead author.

While much of energy-related research and development is focused on alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, the Xing team’s efforts in power transmission are just as important, Jena said.

“Power generation gets a lot of press, and it should,” he said. “But once the power is generated, the amount of power that is lost because of inefficiencies is mind-bogglingly large. This problem is about conservation rather than generating power, which is really the same thing.

“And the scale of losses today actually far surpasses the total of renewable energies combined,” he said. “And it’s a clear and present solution; it’s not like we have to discover something fundamental.”

The team’s work is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) “SWITCHES” program. SWITCHES stands for Strategies for Wide Bandgap, Inexpensive Transistors for Controlling High-Efficiency Systems.

“Leading one of these projects, we at Cornell – in collaboration with our industrial partners – have established an integrated plan to develop three terminal GaN power transistors, package them, and insert them into circuits and products,” Xing said.

The team’s paper is titled “Near unity ideality factor and Shockley-Read-Hall lifetime in GaN-on-GaN p-n diodes with avalanche breakdown.” Cornell collaborators included Kazuki Nomoto and Vladimir Protasenko, visiting professors in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and graduate students Bo Song and Mingda Zhu. The team also included Jena’s Ph.D. student Meng Qi at the University of Notre Dame, and engineers Ming Pan and Xiang Gao of IQE.

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