Heterogeneous Integration: A Promising Technology to Future Integrated Power Conversion Electronics

Since its renaissance, heterogeneous integration (HI) where unique merits of different silicon or III-V technologies, has been widely explored in many power electronics and achieved remarkable success. It is known that the success of power conversion electronics is mostly attributed to the low-power, fast-response, and accurate mixed-signal control circuitry and the low-loss, high efficiency, and high power-handling power switches. Traditionally, leveraging on a single technology, i.e. monolithic approach by using either CMOS or GaN, for instance, optimization of both control and power circuits could hardly be obtained. Thus, the new challenges of power conversion electronics confront HI approaches, where optimization of various circuits is naturally enabled using different semiconductor technologies. In this review article, we first present the traits and principles of power conversion electronics from both circuit and mathematical aspects. Then, we highlight the progress of HI-enabled power conversion electronics. Rather than presenting an exhaustive literature survey, we instead describe some prominent research highlights from both commercial practices and academic frontiers and provide insight on these case study applications.