Power Devices for Efficient Energy Conversion

Gourab Majumdar received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India, in 1977 and his PhD in engineering from the Kyushu Institute of Technology (KIT), Fukuoka, Japan, in 2005. He started his career at Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Japan, in 1980 in a special on-the-job program. Since 1983, he has worked in the company’s units responsible for advanced power semiconductor development, design, and applications, and since 2012, he is executive fellow in the Semiconductor and Device Group. Dr. Majumdar has published and coauthored many technical papers and books on power devices and holds several patents in related
fields. He received the prestigious National Invention Award in Japan in 2005 for inventing the Intelligent Power Module (IPM) fundamental concept and the Monozukuri Nihon Taishou (Japan Craftsmanship Grand Prix) award from the honorary Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2013 for contributing to the development and commercialization of various generations of IPM devices. He was a visiting lecturer of advanced power semiconductor devices at both Kyushu
University and Tokyo Institute of Technology for several years. In 2016, he was bestowed with an honorary professorship by Amity University, India.

Ikunori Takata received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Kobe University, Kobe, Japan, in 1972 and 1974, respectively. He joined Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in 1974 as an engineer at the company’s Kita-Itami Works, where he
developed the first transistor power module chips and solved the second breakdown phenomena of bipolar junction transistors. Later, he moved to the company’s corporate research center and was charged with managing trench insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) and very-high-voltage (several thousand volts) IGBT device development.
In his last 10 years with Mitsubishi, he worked in the device simulation area and researched the operating limits of IGBTs and the basic operations of pin diodes and bipolar junction transistors (BJTs). After retiring from Mitsubishi in 2010, he was a visiting lecturer of advanced power devices at Tokyo Institute of Technology until 2016.