Dear Readers,

A section of semiconductor engineers are delighted at the sudden prospect they are witnessing very silently! They are not the ones who have been enjoying the limelight of system ICs or memory. Rather they belong to the ‘ordinary’ class of Power Semiconductors! Why is there a sudden importance? Will it sustain the momentum? Let’s look at some of the factors briefly.

Summer of 2003 – Europe with generally a mild climate experienced a sizzling heat. Very low percentage of homes was equipped with air conditioners. The sizzler claimed many lives and subsequently led to a surge in air conditioner sales. The market surged from 570K units to over 3.8 Mi units in 2003!

The air conditioner market in Japan topped out at 7.8 Mi units/year. It is believed that China’s air conditioner market exceeds 13 Mi units/year! Other BRIC countries and emerging markets are not far behind in their growing demand – especially India and Brazil.

It is not just air conditioners, but also other household electrical equipment like refrigerators, washing machines, dish washers and other white goods, whose demand is steadily rising. Now, why are we talking about these ‘old’ technologies now? Let’s look at the context:

Increasing consumption of the white electrical goods in Europe and the developing world, trigger increase in electricity generating capacity. This is on the rise throughout the world. For example, China is today the 2^nd largest electricity producer in the world. As the Asian market is emerging as a major energy consuming society, the shortage of electricity is becoming a major concern, leading to power cuts and shutdown that we ourselves witness here regularly. Most nations would like to halt the rise in energy consumption of equipment like air conditioners. Inverters that use power semiconductors offer a low cost solution to motor control and show the way to cut energy consumption by half. This is inevitable since nations who are signatory to the Kyoto Protocol which came into effect from Feb 2005, will have to promote energy conservation efforts. The energy saved by inverters directly benefits the consumers and their use will become increasingly common around the world. Newer power device technologies also offer reduction of losses. In India too, we have started rating refrigerators and air conditioners on their power consumption efficiency.

Power electronics will play a key role in hybrid vehicles, automobiles that use fuel cells and home use distributed power systems.

Finally, the development of new power electronics technologies is sure to transform society by lowering the per watt cost just as the IC fabrication advances have transformed the information intensive society by lowering the per bit cost, in the words of Prof. Hiromichi of Tokyo Institute of Technology.

As designers and consumers let’s start paying a little more attention to this domain!!