News

2024

  • 02/2024 – We are happy to receive a large group of researchers and experts, including Prof. Jung-Ik Ha of the EECL and Prof. Shenghui Cui of the PCSL and their groups from Seoul National University and other leaders from Hyundai-NGV to visit our group and exchange ideas in a mini-workshop on power electronics.
    • We look forward to possible collaborations with these leading groups in the field.
  • 02/2024 – Several members get a chance to attend the ISSCC 2024, and spend a great time meeting our alumni there. See the photo page!
  • 01/2024 – Ian Gruber joins the group as a BS/MS student to study integrated power converter. Welcome to the group, Ian!
  • 01/2024 – Happy New Year, everyone! May the new year bring a lot of health, joy, happiness, and success to you all. We look forward to another very interesting year for the iPower3Es group with a new projects lined up, new results to be unveiled and to be made.

2023

  • 12/2023 – Roger, Tirtho, Spencer, and Jacob graduated. Congratulations to you all! We are proud to send you to the industry and wish you good luck out there.
  • 11/2023 – We had the first beach party with lots of food, sports, sand, sunshine, beautiful sky, and Pacific Ocean waves …
    • For the soccer game we played, Jacob was Man of the Match!
    • Yes, this makes the news board. See our photo page to see and feel the fun we have!
    • We will do it more and more regularly!
  • 11/2023 – Tirtho successfully delivers his dissertation defense talk and is on track for graduation in December 2023.Congratulations, Dr.-to-be Tirtho Lodh!
  • 10/2023 – Roger successfully delivers a comprehensive dissertation/defense talk and is on track for graduation in December 2023.
    • Congratulations, Dr.-to-be Tianshi (Roger) Xie!
  • 10/2023 – Tirtho continues his series of publications, this time on “Derivation of Ultra-High Gain Hybrid Converter Families for HASEL Actuators Used in Soft Mobile Robots” on the Biomimetics journal. 
    • Congratulations, Tirtho!
  • 09/2023 – Prof. Le gives an invited talk on “Integrated Power Electronics for Heterogenous Integration” at the PwrSoC 2023 in Hannover, Germany with a clear vision that heterogeneously integrated vertical power tree is a crucial part for the future heterogenous integration (HI) systems to achieve their full potentials. In this integrated power tree, switched-capacitor will play an indispensable role.
  • 08/2023 – Casey Hardy published an invited ISSCC-JSSC on “A Reconfigurable Single-Inductor Multi-Stage Hybrid Converter for 1-Cell Battery Chargers” in which we pioneered the first reconfigurable hybrid converter and also the first inductor-middle hybrid converter. This is a great follow up since our 2019 ISSCC publication of an inductor-first hybrid converter.
    • Congratulations, Dr. Hardy!
  • 08/2023 – Prof. Le is officially promoted to Associate Professor. Congratulations, Prof. Le and the iPower3Es group!
  • 08/2023 – Tirtha successfully published his work on “Power Electronic Drivers for Electrostatic HASEL Actuators Used in Soft Mobile Robots” at the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Industrial Electronics.
    • Congratulations, Tirtha!!
  • 05/2023 – Zhiheng successfully passed the Prelim exam and will be the first UCSD M.S. student to become a Ph.D. student in our group.
    • Congratulations, Zhiheng!
  • 05/2023 – Our MS students rock this time: Jacob and Zhiheng have two papers accepted to ECCE 2023, one on a new switched transformer converter and the other one on a 3-phase motor driver converter.
    • Congratulations, Jacob and Zhiheng!
  • 04/2023 – Kristopher Ngo joins the group as a UCSD ECE undergrad to study integrated circuits. Welcome, Kristopher!
  • 04/2023 – Ratul’s paper “Averaged Switch Modeling of Multi-Inductor Hybrid Converters” is accepted for presentation at the IEEE 24th Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL 2023). Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 03/2023 – We are excited to welcome two visiting scholars to our group, Prof. Hyung-Min Lee and his student, senior Ph.D. student Woojoong Jung, from the BASIC Lab of Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. In this visit, we will work together on a fantastic new direction for both groups: Integrated harvester for ocean energy!
    • Welcome to iPower3Es and UCSD, Prof. Lee and Woojoong!
  • 03/2023 – Ratul receives an Outstanding Presentation Award for his presentation of the paper: “Multi-Inductor Multi-Output Hybrid (MiMoH) Converter for Large Conversion Ratio and Multiple Outputs” at APEC 2023. Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 03/2023 – Ratul, Roger, and Hieu make great representations of the iPower3Es group at the PMIC booth and at APEC 2023 with their presentations. Thank you and congratulations to you all!
  • 02/2023 – We had very successful presentations, demos, great interactions with industry and academic communities, and overall a great time at ISSCC 2023. (See our photo page). Congratulations to the iPower3Es team!
  • 01/2023 – Tirtha published an important paper on “An Ultra High Gain Converter for Driving HASEL Actuator Used in Soft Mobile Robots” on the Biomimetics journal. We have more to come on this direction.
    • Congratulations, Tirtha!
  • 01/2023 – Happy New Year, everyone! May the new year bring a lot of health, joy, happiness, and success to you all. We look forward to a remarkable year of the iPower3Es group with a lot of new works and findings to be unveiled and to be made.

2022

  • 12/2022 – iPower3Es group receives support from the PMIC center to develop a new integrated power converter on a GaN process. After a lot of effort, we are joining very few groups in the world working on integrated power converters on GaN. This is yet another new super exciting endeavor for our group!
  • 11/2022 – Casey and Ratul successfully delivered their Ph.D. defense talks, on track to become the first 2 Ph.D. graduates from the iPower3Es lab! Big Congrats, Dr. Hardy and Dr. Das!
    • Ratul sets a record for the number of paper publications (12 conference + 4 journal papers) while Casey sets a record of 3 ISSCC papers during Ph.D. in the group. Any current or future member of the group who can break the record in either integrated or discrete power electronics will receive a big award from the group and Prof. Le.
  • 11/2022 – We are excited to have completely moved to Franklin Antonio Hall, a fantastic new building designed for collaborative research, active learning, and technology transfer. You are welcome to visit us here on the second floor!
    • Stay tuned for our new photos and updates.
  • 10/2022 – Roger, Ratul, and Hieu have 3 papers accepted for lecture presentation at APEC 2023, on innovative power converter topologies, circuits, and controls of 3 different hybrid converters.
    • Congratulations, Roger, Ratul, and Hieu! This is a significant contribution to a very good year for iPower3Es!
  • 10/2022 – Casey leads a large group of IC students at iPower3Es in a paper accepted to ISSCC 2023 on a first-ever heterogeneously integrated vertical power delivery architecture for high-performance computing.
    • Big congratulations to the whole team for this remarkable (and to-be-very-influential) achievement!
  • 10/2022 – Casey has his own paper accepted to ISSCC 2023 on a novel Single-Inductor Multi-Stage (SIMS) converter. Congratulations, Casey! There cannot be a better achievement before graduation.
    • Casey sets an ISSCC record in the group that guarantees a big reward (by Prof. Le) for whoever can break it.
  • 09/2022 – Hai-Nam Vu joins the group for Ph.D. after his work at Mobility, Logistics & Automotive Technology Research Centre, Brussel, Belgium, and M.S. study at Soongsil University, South Korea. Welcome, Hai-Nam!
  • 09/2022 – Jacob Lopez and Spencer Chang came back to the group after their internships, but now as M.S. students. Welcome back, Spencer and Jacob!
  • 09/2022 – Kai-Wen Chang joins the group as a UCSD ECE undergrad to start his journey in understanding and implementing power converters. Welcome, Kai-Wen!
  • 08/2022 – iPower3Es group receives support from the PMIC center to develop a new power delivery and management architecture for next-generation electric motors. This is the start of a new super exciting endeavor for our group!
  • 07/2022 – Ratul published a general yet intuitive analysis to understand and predict the voltage imbalance behavior of flying capacitors in hybrid converters in his paper “Analysis of Capacitor Voltage Imbalance in Hybrid Converters and Inherently Balanced Operation Using Symmetric Architecture” in the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Industrial Electronics. Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 06/2022 – Zhiheng Luo (previously at VirginiaTech) joins our group for his M.S. study. Welcome, Zhiheng!
  • 05/2022 – Tirtha has been awarded the Best Teaching Assistant Award for his outstanding performance as a TA of the ECE 125B class. This is a great recognition and honor. Congratulations, Tirtha! You do make us proud.
  • 04/2022 – Roger is awarded the Best Poster Award at the UCSD Research Expo 2022. Great job, Roger!
  • 04/2022 – Prof. Le has been appointed a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) DL Program for a 2-year term until December 2023. Congratulations, Prof. Le!
  • 03/2022 – Ratul published his paper “Gate Driver Circuits With Discrete Components For A GaN-based Multi-Level Multi Inductor Hybrid Converter” on the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, one of the highest impact factor IEEE journals. Congratulations, Ratul! This is a great achievement and Ratul knows it best.
  • 02/2022 – Gaurav and Reilly, M.S. students at UCSD, join the group to work on an ITSAB converter and a new energy harvester. Welcome, Gaurav and Reilly!
  • 01/2022 – First good news in the new year: Roger has a paper accepted to the 2022 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference on new Integrated Transformerless Stacked Active Bridge Converters (ITSAB), a new hybrid converter with outstanding performance and integrated control loop response. Congratulations, Roger!
  • 01/2022 – Happy New Year, everyone! May the new year bring a lot of health, joys, success, and happiness to you all. May it also bring an effective end to the COVID19 pandemic! We look forward to coming back to normal operations in person, as well as moving to the new Franklin Antonio Hall building at UCSD.

2021

  • 12/2021 – iPower3Es group receives funding from the Power Management Integration Center for two projects, led by Casey and Ratul, working on innovative hybrid converters for mobile and high-performance computing applications. The credits go to Casey and Ratul!
  • 11/2021 – Spencer joins our group to improve design automation for integrated power converter design. Welcome, Spencer!
  • 10/2021 – Ratul has a paper accepted to COMPEL 2021 on an accurate approach to calculating and measuring capacitor voltages and inductor currents in hybrid converters. Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 09/2021 – UCSD officially joins the Power Management Integration Center as a new center site in addition to one at Dartmouth College. Prof. Le will serve as a Co-director of the Center. The focus of PMIC matches perfectly with the research direction of the iPower3Es group. Congratulations, Prof. Le and the whole group!
  • 09/2021 – Po-Han joins our group from NYMCTU, Hsinchu, Taiwan. Welcome, Po-Han!
    • In addition to his ECE department fellowship, Po-Han is also selected to be a 2021 J. Yang Scholarship scholar, the program with a mission to promote recruiting and retaining highly promising future scholars from Taiwan. Congratulations, Po-Han!
  • 09/2021 – Saket joins to explore our group, from IIT Kanpur, India. Welcome, Saket!
  • 09/2021 – Ryan Tran, an ECE undergrad, joins us to explore a new inverter for future electric motors. Welcome, Ryan!
  • 09/2021 – Lam Tran, an ECE undergrad, joins us to explore a boost converter for LCD backlight. Welcome, Lam!
  • 07/2021 – Jacob Lopez, an ECE undergrad, joins us to work with Ratul on a new power converter design with a novel stack structure. Welcome, Jacob!
  • 06/2021 – Roger and Hieu are interning at TI and Intel this Summer. Great learning opportunities for them. Congrats!
  • 05/2021 – Ratul has two papers, accepted to ECCE 2021, on innovative converters for direct AC grid-to-DC and 48VDC-to-1VDC isolated conversions. Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 04/2021 – Jonah Soong, a freshman in Computer Engineering, joins our group for research exploration. Welcome, Jonah!
  • 01/2021 – Prof. Le is awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER award for his research in Next-Generation Integrated Hybrid DC-DC Converters for Future More-DC World. Congratulations to Prof. Le and the iPower3Es group!
  • 01/2021 – A quick description of our project funded by Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship, covered on the Department of Computer Science and Engineering website.
  • 01/2021 – Happy New Year, everyone! We are looking forward to a new year with a lot more research updates and good news!

2020

  • 10/2020 – Our paper “Low power PMIC with two hybrid converters for TEG application application” that reflects our recent collaboration with BKIC of HUST, Vietnam, and NICE of KAIST, Korea, is accepted for presentation at the 2020 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems (APCCAS). Congratulations, BKIC team and Hieu!
  • 09/2020 – After exactly one year of being at UCSD, we are now part of 3 renowned research centers, the Semiconductor Research Centers (SRC), the UCSD’s Center for Wireless Communications, and the Center for Machine-Integrated Computing and Security.
    • We look forward to more collaborations and creating more innovations with all our industry partners and supporters. Thank you so much!
  • 09/2020 – Fresh TCAS-I paper, entitled “Power Management IC With a Three-Phase Cold Self-Start For Thermoelectric Generators,” Hieu and I co-author in a collaboration with the BKIC Group at HUST, Vietnam. Congratulations Hieu and BKIC!
  • 09/2020 – Hieu Minh Pham officially joins our group from HUST, Hanoi, Vietnam. Welcome, Hieu!
  • 09/2020 – We have won the prestigious Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship to work on a novel power delivery for high-performance computing in mobile applications, in a collaboration with Prof. Patrick Mercier’s group. Congratulations Casey and Abdullah!
  • 08/2020 – Two separate research projects led by Tai and Ratul have been accepted to be presented at the ECCE Student Project Demonstration 2020. Congratulations, Tai and Ratul!
  • 06/2020 – Our iPower3Es group participates in AC/DC conversion research with successful tests of a new AC/DC converter! This achievement is credited to Ratul. Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 05/2020 – We have been awarded a prestigious Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) award to support our work in electronics for future soft robots. 
  • 05/2020 – Tai Truong, a UCSD undergrad, joins our group to work on a project aimed to provide low-cost, sustainable power for remote areas. Welcome, Tai!
  • 04/2020 – Prof. Le delivers a special IEEE SSCS & PELS Joint Webinar on Integrated Power Delivery and Management for High-Performance Digital Systems on Wednesday, April 22, 8:00 AM Pacific Time.
  • 04/2020 – Our second paper of the MIH converter family, entitled “Analysis of Dual-Inductor Hybrid Converters for Extreme Conversion Ratios,” is published in the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics (IEEE JESTPE). Congrats, Ratul!
  • 03/2020 – Our project proposal, entitled “Vertical Hybrid Power Delivery for High-Performance Processors and Digital Systems,” authored by Casey Hardy and Abdullah Abdulslam in collaboration with the Energy-Efficient Microsystems lab led by Prof. Patrick Mercier, has been chosen as one of the finalists at the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. Congratulations Casey and Abdullah!
  • 03/2020 – The iPower3Es group virtualizes 95% of our research operations because of COVID-19.
    • This is a new challenge for us, but it also gives us a great opportunity to optimize our work a lot better with remote designing, testing, and reporting.
    • We are still moving ahead as fast as we can with our interesting projects.
  • 02/2020 – Prof. Le is invited to gives a talk on “Next-Generation Circuit Architectures for Power-Supply on Chip” at Forum 5: Power Management as an Enabler of Future SoC’s at the 2020 ISSCC.
  • 01/2020 – Manh Truong is the first UCSD undergrad to join our group. Welcome, Manh! We believe you can both learn a lot and help us with some projects here.

2019

  • 12/2019 – All the current members of the group have finally arrived in San Diego, including Tirtho! We are ready to take on new exciting challenges in 2020.
  • 11/2019 – Roger and Miquel’s work on a new compact hybrid converter that supports ~2000X voltage conversion ratios from 1V-3V input to 1kV-5kV output for soft robots has been accepted to APEC 2020. Congrats, Roger and Miquel!
  • 11/2019 – Casey’s work on a new integrated hybrid converter for smart cable solution, published at ISSCC, has been invited and accepted to JSSC. Congrats, Casey!
    • It is indeed rare to see an integrated converter paper that has a complete set of new topology, practical application, smart use of parasitics in the environment, and compliance with EMC standard requirements!
  • 10/2019 – Most of the group members finally arrive at UCSD. 
  • 09/2019 – A new lab is being built up with nice cubicles, height-adjustable desks, and a flexible meeting room.
  • 09/2019 – Our first paper on the MIH converter family is published in the IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications. Congrats, Gabsu!
  • 08/2019 – Prof. Le accepts an offer to go to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He will be on leave from CU Boulder in the 2019-2020 academic year.
  • 07/2019 – Prof. Le is elevated to IEEE Senior member. IEEE Senior Membership is an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession.
  • 06/2019 – Our paper entitled “Demystifying Capacitor Voltages and Inductor Currents in Hybrid Converters” by Ratul Das, Janko Celikovic, Siamak Abedinpour, Mark Mercer, Dragan Maksimovic, and Hanh-Phuc Le has been awarded a COMPEL 2019 Best Paper Award! Big congratulations, Ratul!
  • 06/2019 – Our work of Dual Inductor Hybrid (DIH) converter in the Multi-Inductor Hybrid (MIH) converter family is covered in this EDN article as one of the promising candidates for data center power delivery that has remarkably high efficiencies for large conversion ratios, i.e. 48V to 1V-2V. 
  • 05/2019 – Ratul’s paper on demystifying capacitor voltage balancing issues and inductor current fluctuations in hybrid converters has been accepted to COMPEL 2019. Congratulations, Ratul!
  • 05/2019 – Ashwini, Hoang, and Quyet join the group as a summer intern and exchange students from IIT Kharagpur, India and HUST, Hanoi, Vietnam. Welcome to the team!
  • 03/2019 – Prof. Le is elected the chair of the IEEE Power Electronics Society Technical Committee on Power Conversion Systems and Components (IEEE PELS TC2) 
  • 03/2019 – Ratul’s and Roger’s converter boards in our Multi-Inductor Hybrid (MIH) converter family are featured at EPC exhibition booth at APEC 2019. Congratulations, Ratul and Roger!
  • 03/2019 – Gabsu’s paper on analyses of the S-Hybrid Step-Down DC-DC Converter has been accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. Congratulations, Gabsu!
  • 02/2019 – Miquel and Phillip are three new energetic junior undergrads who join us from Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, and CU Boulder. Welcome to the team and look forward to your interesting learning and contributions ahead. 
  • 01/2019 – Casey, Ratul, and Roger will intern at AMD, TI, and ADI this Summer. These will be great learning opportunities for them. Congrats!
  • 01/2019 – A new direction for 2019: we have officially started our effort in integrated/miniaturized power electronics for robotics. CU Boulder’s Autonomous Systems Interdisciplinary Research Theme (ASIRT) is the first to partially sponsor us in this direction. 
  • 01/2019 – Good news for a new year: Dialog Semiconductor Inc. has decided to sponsor our research via the CoPEC center.
    • Dialog is our newest sponsor, together with Oracle, TI, PowerAmerica, Lockheed Martin, and NSF. Thank you all!

2018

  • 10/2018 – Casey’s paper on an efficient Flying-Inductor Hybrid DC-DC Converter IC for 1-Cell and 2-Cell battery charging applications is accepted to the 2019 ISSCC. Congratulations, Casey!
    • This has completed a successful year of the group with all group members getting papers accepted for oral/lecture presentations (100% success rate!!) at the flagship conferences of the field, ISSCC for IC and APEC for Power Electronics. See you at these venues next year. 
  • 10/2018 – EPC features the first DIHC prototype in our new hybrid converter family on a GaNTalk blog that becomes extremely popular with a lot of reported reads. Recognizing the high interest level, another Power Electronics media want to feature our work on their site soon. Stay tuned!
  • 10/2018 – Prof. Le chairs the technical program at the International Workshop on Power Supply On Chip (PwrSoC ’18) at NCTU, Hsinchu, Taiwan. The workshop was attended by >170 experts from 4 different continents. 
  • 10/2018 – Three papers accepted for lecture presentations at APEC 2019. The papers describe our inventions around a new hybrid DC-DC converter family capable of ultra-high efficiency for large conversion ratios and large current density. Congratulations, Ratul and Roger!
  • 09/2018 – Prof. Le chairs and speaks at a special session at the ECCE 2018 – “Advancements, Challenges, and End-games in PwrSoC.” 
  • 08/2018 – We welcome a group of visiting scholars and research collaborators from Vietnam, including Dr. Loan Pham-Nguyen, Quyet Nguyen-Van, and Manh Nguyen-Duc, to our group! They will present a paper in a collaborative work with our group at ECCE in Sept. 2018. 
  • 07/2018 – Awarded a 3-year project, by NSF-ECCS, on new Grid-to-Core power delivery architectures and topologies for IT systems. 
  • 06/2018 – Prof. Le teaches an Analog IC Design summer class at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Vietnam. 
  • 04/2018 – Two papers accepted to ECCE 2018. Congratulations, Ratul and Gabsu!
  • 04/2018 – Prof. Le chairs the Power Management Circuits and Architectures session and the IC Startup panel at the 2018 CICC. 
  • 03/2018 – Awarded a project, by PowerAmerica, on power module for high-performance IT and communication systems. The project is in collaborations with Prof. Maksimovic and Lockheed Martin. 
  • 01/2018 – Tianshi “Roger” Xie joins our group from UT Dallas and Techtronic Industries North America. Welcome, Roger!

2017

  • 12/2017 – Gabsu receives an official offer and will go to work for NREL from Jan 2018. Congratulations, Gabsu!
  • 10/2017 – Prof. Le is officially appointed the TPC chair of the 2018 PwrSoC
  • 09/2017 – TI’s Kilby Labs has decided to sponsor our research program. Thank you, Kilby Labs Power Management group!
  • 08/2017 – Ratul Das joins our group from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Welcome, Ratul!
  • 08/2017 – Yossi moves to UCSD. Congratulations and good luck, Yossi!
  • 06/2017 – We found out that Murray Slovick, a long-time veteran editor-in-chief of the IEEE flagship publication Spectrum, wrote about our APEC paper in his note on TTI Marketeye on 04/14/2017. 
  • 05/2017 – Nikolai graduated. Good luck, Nikolai!
  • 03/2017 – Oracle Labs has become our first research sponsor. Thank you, Oracle’s VLSI Research Group!
  • 02/2017 – Prof. Le to give an educational session on “Circuit Design Techniques for Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator Using Switched Capacitors” at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) 2017. 

2016

2015