Veliadis Recognized With 2026 APEX Award of Excellence
The award, presented by the IEEE Power Electronics Society, was given in the category of "Writing/Topics > Technical and Technology Writing" for a peer-reviewed article published in 2025.
PowerAmerica Executive Director and CTO Victor Veliadis was presented with a 2026 APEX Award of Excellence in the category of “Writing/Topics > Technical and Technology Writing” at IEEE’s annual Energy Conversion Congress & Expo, which was held from Oct. 4-8 in Vancouver, Canada.
The award, presented by the IEEE Power Electronics Society, was given to Veliadis and Thomas Jahns, an emeritus professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a paper they co-authored — “Monolithic Bidirectional Lateral GaN Switches Reinvigorate Power Electronics Applications” — which was published in IEEE Power Electronics Magazine in March 2025.
Read the abstract
Monolithic bidirectional (BD) voltage/current lateral GaN switches are becoming commercially available, leveraging the ”silicon” economies of scale established by the mature lateral power GaN infrastructure. Key features of major alternative BD device architectures are reviewed. In particular, monolithic BD switches with a dual-gate structure are advantageous since they have a common drain region that reduces cell-pitch and on-state resistance Ron, and only increase switch area by about 1.2X compared to similarly rated commercial GaN unidirectional voltage blocking devices. There are many types of power electronics applications that benefit very directly and, in some cases, dramatically from the commercial availability of monolithic BD switches. Four promising candidate applications are briefly discussed including matrix converters, current-source inverters, T-Type multi-level voltage-source inverters, and solid-state circuit breakers. The article closes with an acknowledgment of the practical obstacles to the commercial production of monolithic BD switches and reasons for optimism that these obstacles will be overcome.
As Executive Director and CTO of PowerAmerica, Veliadis has managed a budget of $156 million — strategically allocated to over 210 industrial and university projects to catalyze SiC and GaN semiconductor and power electronics manufacturing, workforce development, and job creation. His PowerAmerica educational activities have trained 430 full-time university students in collaborative industry-university wide bandgap (WBG) projects, and engaged over 7500 attendees in tutorials, short courses, and webinars. Veliadis is also a professor at NC State University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, a National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow, and an IEEE EDS Distinguished Lecturer.
Jahns is a Grainger Emeritus Professor of power electronics and electric machines at UW-Madison’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Jahns joined UW-Madison in 1998, and from 2007 to 2021, he served as Co-Director/Director of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC). Prior to UW-Madison, Jahns worked for 15 years at GE Corporate Research and Development. Jahns was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2015 and received the IEEE Medal in Power Engineering in 2022. He received the 2005 IEEE Nikola Tesla Technical Field Award and the Industry Applications Society (IAS) Outstanding Achievement Award in 2011. He has served both the IAS and the Power Electronics Society (PELS) as a Distinguished Lecturer.
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