Both Chen and Divan are affiliated with the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); Chen is a recent ECE Ph.D. graduate, and Divan is the John E. Pippin Chair Professor in the School and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. The title of their award-winning paper is “Soft-Switching Solid-State Transformer (S4T),” published in the April 2018 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. 

The idea of a solid-state transformer (SST) has attracted tremendous interest for almost five decades, ever since the principles of power conversion were first understood. The SST is a combination of a high-frequency transformer link and solid-state switching circuits. High-frequency isolation allows for the saving of significant volume and weight of magnetic materials. Conventionally, the SST has been implemented with a three-stage power converter that has high semiconductor device count, hard-switching, and limited voltage conversion ratio.

This paper proposed a new SST power converter topology that uses a minimal number of semiconductor devices and achieves soft-switching power conversion with only one conversion stage. This invention also represents a family of power converters for dc/dc, single-phase ac to dc, single-phase ac to multi-phase ac, and multi-port structure, all with soft-switching capability – a desired feature for achieving high converter efficiency and lower electromagnetic noise. This invention can find a wide range of applications including electrified transportation, energy storage, EV fast chargers, and renewable energy integration.

Chen’s and Divan's paper was selected out of 935 papers published and some 13,000 papers that were submitted to the journal. The work covered by this paper has now become a major research thrust for the Center for Distributed Energy, which is led by Divan. Hao graduated with his Ph.D. in ECE from Georgia Tech in 2016 and is now a staff electronic design engineer at Tesla in Palo Alto, California.

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Photo cutline: Pictured left to right are Hao Chen of Tesla and Deepak Divan of Georgia Tech, the coauthors of the 2018 best paper award for the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, and Yaow-Ming Chen from the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University. Chen serves as the journal’s editor-in-chief.