Electrical Engineering Professor and Alumni Win Best Paper Award

University Relations

Alan Mantooth

A team of electrical engineering researchers earned the "Best Paper" award from an international journal for their work on a chip that is programmable, self-testing and can operate at extremely high temperatures.

Alan Mantooth, distinguished professor of electrical engineering and Twenty-First Century Research Leadership Chair in Engineering; Matt Barlow, senior engineer at Ozark Integrated Circuits; Shamim Ahmed, staff engineer at Qualcomm; and Matt Francis, founder and president at Ozark Integrated Circuits, received one of four "Best Paper" awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Power Electronics journal for 2019.

The paper was selected from more than 1,000 pieces published in the journal in 2019.

The paper, titled "An integrated SiC CMOS gate driver for power module integration," was a result of Barlow's doctoral work under Mantooth's direction. The paper focuses on the world's most advanced single chip gate driver, a circuit that controls the switching behavior of power semiconductor devices. This chip is programmable, has built-in self-test, and can operate at temperatures exceeding 400 degrees Celsius.

The work enables power electronic systems to be more power-dense and have improved electrical performance since the chip can be integrated within the same package housing the power devices.

Ahmed was a Ph.D. student in Mantooth's lab while the work was performed, and contributed through his device modeling activities. Francis was a post-doc in Mantooth's laboratory while simultaneously leading Ozark Integrated Circuits at the time of the research.

Mantooth manages the UA Power Group, a multidisciplinary group of researchers working to deliver next-generation electronic vehicles, renewable energy systems, grid infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

Transactions on Power Electronics was named the top power engineering journal in 2019 by Google Scholar and is perennially among the most highly ranked journals in all of IEEE.