A cross-institutional research team led by Chair Professor Kevin CHEN Jing of Electronic and Computer Engineering Department has successfully fabricated a first-of-its-kind transistor which they called a gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) hybrid field-effect transistor, or HyFET. Their impressive work was recently featured in IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), with the headline “Is This Hybrid Tech the Future of Power Electronics?”

Their work was described in their paper titled “HyFET—A GaN/SiC Hybrid Field-Effect Transistor”, which they presented at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) 2023, held this past December in San Francisco.

In the paper, they experimentally demonstrate a GaN/SiC hybrid field-effect transistor (HyFET)—a novel power electron device that can harness the complementary merits of GaN and SiC and circumvent their notorious drawbacks. The experimental demonstration unveils a new power device platform enabling the utmost integration of these two prevailing wide-bandgap semiconductors.

The link to the technical paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10413796