Microwave Journal
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NEULAND Project Addresses Energy Efficiency

February 2, 2011

Six partners from the semiconductor and solar industries are joining forces in the NEULAND project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany, to explore new avenues for the efficient use of electricity from renewable sources. NEULAND stands for innovative power devices with high energy efficiency and cost effectiveness based on wide bandgap compound semiconductors.


The project aims to reduce the losses in feeding electricity into the grid without significantly increasing system costs. This is to be achieved using innovative semiconductor devices based on silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si). The new semiconductor devices are also to be used in future in switched-mode power supplies for telecommunication systems, desktop and laptop PCs, flat-screen TVs and servers with the aim of reducing energy losses for such applications by about half.

The NEULAND project will run until mid-2013 and is headed by Infineon. The project consortium brings together outstanding expertise in SiC and GaN across a very wide area of the value chain. The project will receive funding at 52.6 percent to the tune of approximately € 4.7 M from the BMBF under the German Federal Government's "High-Tech Strategy – Information and Communications Technology 2020," ICT 2020 program, as part of the call for proposals on Power Electronics for Energy Efficiency Enhancement.