Led by Alan Mantooth, professor of electrical engineering, and Yarui Peng, assistant professor of computer science and computer engineering, a team of U of A engineering students from both the electrical engineering and the computer science and computer engineering departments — Quang Le, Imam Al Razi and Tristan Evans — recently participated in the 2021 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition Student Project Demo Competition and won first place for their project, "PowerSynth: an MCPM Layout Optimization Tool."

The IEEE PELS Student Design Methodology Competition is organized by the IEEE ECCE Committee on Student Activities and the IEEE PPELS Technical Committees for student teams to demonstrate their innovative software tools for power electronics. ECCE is the foremost IEEE conference in the field of power electronics and energy conversion.

Their research project developed PowerSynth, a multiobjective optimization tool for the rapid design and verification of power semiconductor modules. It can reduce the time required for layout synthesis from six weeks in industry-standard into several minutes while keeping a 10 percent modeling accuracy. This project is funded by NSF through the Engineering Research Center for Power Optimization of Electro-Thermal Systems. The team has produced a series of software releases and publications, including a highlighted paper in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.

More information about the project can be found on the PowerSynth release website.