![\"Francis](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Plab1.jpg\")
<\/a>The key difference between these materials lies in their electronic bandgap\u2014the energy needed to get electrons to flow through the material. Wider bandgaps allow companies to reduce the size of their electronics and make them more electrically efficient.<\/p>\n
\u201cUWBG materials can resist up to 8,000 volts and can operate at temperatures over 200 \u00b0C (392\u00b0F), making them promising for the next generation of electronics in the energy, health, and communication sectors,\u201d explains Georges Pavlidis, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.<\/p>\n
While these materials offer promising advantages, they also come with challenges. They\u2019re currently expensive, difficult to manufacture, and their thermal behavior is hard to measure precisely. As electronics become more powerful and in smaller dimensions, the heating in the device becomes more localized and can generate a heat flux greater than the sun, Pavlidis explains.<\/p>\n
\u201cChip manufacturers need new methods to measure temperature in smaller dimensions,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Pavlidis, along with UConn\u2019s School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering Ph.D. candidates Dominic Myren and Francis V\u00e1squez, collaborated with colleagues from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory over the past year to tackle the challenge of measuring the heat output. Their work resulted in a \u201cPerspectives\u201d paper published in Applied Physics Letters.<\/p>\n
\u201cA ‘Perspectives’ paper is intended to be an outline of what\u2019s coming soon, get people excited about what\u2019s coming, and encourage other researchers to start looking into similar topics,” says Myren, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow<\/a> who has seven years of industrial R&D experience in fuel systems, internal combustion, and engine controls and holds patents related to electromagnetic actuators and engine controls. <\/span>“The push right now is for the development of thermal management strategies in wide and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor devices. <\/span>We have a lot of open questions, and we\u2019re working hard on them over in Dr. Pavlidis\u2019 lab, but the cross pollination of ideas is how academic circles thrive.”<\/p>\n Titled \u201cEmerging Thermal Metrology for Ultrawide Bandgap Semiconductor Devices<\/a>,\u201d the co-authors discuss the pros and cons of using UWBG material for semiconductors, and outline several innovative techniques for measuring temperature at the microscale. These methods could help engineers design faster, more powerful electronic devices\u2014without the risk of overheating.<\/p>\n After the paper ran online in late May, the co-authors received an unexpected note from the editors at Applied Physics Letters. \u201c[We] felt that your article is noteworthy, and have chosen it to be promoted as an Editor’s Pick. It will be posted on the journal homepage, and a badge will be displayed next to the title.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is no small feat for a publication to be chosen as an Editor\u2019s Pick in the highly regarded Applied Physics Letters that publishes more than 2,000 articles a year,\u201d says JC Zhao, dean of the UConn College of Engineering.\u00a0\u201cI congratulate Professor Pavlidis and his group on this recognition and I am very proud of their accomplishment.\u201d<\/p>\n V\u00e1squez’s particular research interests are thermal management for high-power and radio-frequency (RF) power electronics. In Pavlidis’s lab, he enjoys the combination of research and meaningful application where the group solves real challenges in electronics and photonics that directly impact energy efficiency, reliability, and performance.<\/p>\n “What makes the experience truly special is the lab culture,” V\u00e1squez says. “Professor Pavlidis is incredibly supportive and patient, especially when we hit difficult knowledge to explain, and he always encourages us to stay curious. His approach pushes us to explore new ideas, test them rigorously, and think about how our work can translate into real-world innovations. It\u2019s that mix of intellectual freedom and high standards to make an impact that keeps me excited every day in the lab.”<\/p>\n In the paper, the researchers explore several options to measure temperature in UWBG devices. They suggest using optical methods like Raman spectroscopy and thermoreflectance, which use light to measure temperature dependent properties. Electrical methods use electric signals to detect temperature, and scanning probe methods, like scanning thermal microscopy, touch the surface to feel the heat.<\/p>\n The researchers also describe exciting new ideas, like combining thermal images created from different colors of light to see heat in nitride-based devices, or measuring how light is absorbed in material defects to calculate the temperature in gallium oxide electronics. They\u2019re even working on a new kind of microscope that can see very tiny heat patterns using deep ultraviolet light.<\/p>\n \u201cThese proposed methods provide a solution to measuring the peak temperature in future electronics which is the primary indicator of when the device will fail. Providing the industry with accurate metrology will lower the barrier to commercialization and enable engineers to develop new thermal management strategies,” Pavlidis says.<\/p>\n The group\u2019s research is supported by Microelectronics Commons, a program specifically created to commercialize UWBG devices for power electronics. The Commons program established the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub, a network of more than 200 organizations, academic institutions, commercial and defense companies, and federally funded centers concentrated in eight northeast states. The idea for the paper stemmed from a project Pavlidis worked on last summer as an Office of Naval Research Fellow.<\/p>\n Moving forward, Pavlidis\u2014who was promoted to a Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) this month\u2014aims to work with semiconductor partners in developing affordable strategies to reduce the temperature in power electronics. By pushing the resolution limits of temperature measurements, the lab plans to extend their methods to improve other technologies such as quantum computing and photonic circuits. They’ve already worked with colleagues at the University of Maryland to design photonic hardware for next-generation data storage. (View the study in this May 2025 Nature Communications<\/a> paper.)<\/p>\n \u201cWe hope our work has laid the foundation for the thermal design of the next generation of UWBG devices,\u201d Pavlidis says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a paper published as an Editor’s Pick in Applied Physics Letters, College of Engineering’s Georges Pavlidis outlines ways to manage heat in high-speed electronics <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":201,"featured_media":232048,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1866,2460,2459,2648,2076,1875,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2514],"class_list":["post-231723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engr","category-faculty","category-graduate-students","category-blue-research","category-research","category-grad-school","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 07:25:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/201"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231723"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232403,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231723\/revisions\/232403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/232048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231723"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=231723"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=231723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>