IEEE Princeton/Central Jersey & Philadelphia Joint Section Power Electronics & Industry Applications Joint Societies Chapter (CH01279)

Chair: Dr. Grant Pitel  email: gpitel at magna-power.com

Vice Chair: Vishram Deshpande  email: vpdeshpande at yahoo.com

Secretary    Fei Lu  email: fei.lu at drexel.edu

 

Chapter Update – July 30, 2022

The group is alive and well.  We have remained in good standing with IEEE by hitting our activities quota with webinars from the Distinguished Lecturer (DL) program and from invited speakers at the Andlinger Center in Princeton. Now that in-person events are normalizing, we need your help to keep it going.  We are forming two subcommittees to diversify activities to better capture the interests of our local members.  
Call for Volunteers

The first subcommittee is for Education, which is responsible for selecting, inviting, planning, and organizing educational speakers. Our supporting societies (PELS/IAS) provides a directory of available speakers.  They will pay for the food/travel of these presenters provided we plan ahead and formalize a request.  PPPEAC expects a minimum of one speaker a year and subcommittee members can coordinate with each other over email. 

Distinguished Lecturers for 2022-2023

  1. https://ias.ieee.org/chapters-membership/distinguished-lecturer-program.html
  2. https://www.ieee-pels.org/distinguished-lecturers/pels-dls

The second subcommittee is for Trips and Tours.  NJ/Philly is an industrious area rich in technology history.  Our group alone contains many companies who would welcome factory/research tours. Our IEEE sections are strong and can provide an even larger pool to pull from. The first tour offered by the group is described in the upcoming events sections.

Again, we need your help to keep this chapter running.  Please contact any one of our officers if you would like to get on the mailing list for these subcommittees.  
Officer Changes

Prof. Xiaonan Lu, founding member, and PPPEAC Secretary has accepted an Associate Professor position at Purdue University in Indiana, and can no longer serve in his role.  Prof. Fei Lu from Drexel University has been nominated to take over his role.  I would like to personally thank Xiaonan for his valuable input over the years with planning the chapter and its events.  I wish him the best at Purdue and look forward to working with Fei. In addition, Prof. Minjie Chen, our other founding member and Treasurer, needs to resign from his role due to his research obligations. He has agreed to continue to support by recommending speakers to the group. Thank you Minjie for your service. I am certain you will retain a strong presence in the group.  
Upcoming Events

I was invited to give a webinar to PELS San Francisco Bay Area Chapter (SBAC-PELS)  on Thursday September 15th.  They have graciously agreed to co-host the event with PPPEAC and handle streaming and registration. However, there is a twist.  Magna-Power Electronics will host an in-person on site meeting the next day for follow up questions, food, refreshments, and factory tour. This will also be an administrative meeting, to meet our officers, and an open forum for activities suggestions.  If you suffer from webinar burn out –  you are welcome to read the magazine article from which the presentation is based, and just attend the tour.  Space is limited. Preference will be given to society, IEEE, PPPEAC members, and non-members, respectively. 

Registration for SBAC-PELS and PPPEAC Webinar
Power Electronics Hardware Design for Manufacturability
Thursday September 15th, 3pm ET (make note of time zone)
https://bit.ly/sfbac_mfg

Registration for Factory Tour/ General Meeting
Magna-Power Electronics, Inc.
Friday September 16th, 4 – 6pm ET
39 Royal Road
Flemington, NJ 08822
https://bit.ly/3S9PLbM

Newsletter Sign Up
If you are not already registered to receive emails from PPPEAC, please sign-up using the link below to get on our mailing list.
New PPPEAC Member Registration

Upcoming conferences:

Past Meetings

Dr Grant Pitel spoke at the IEEE Power and Energy Conference on April 1, 2021

Enabling the Future Through Power Electronics: A Conversation with Experts (4:00 PM CDT / 21:00 UTC / 02:30(Fri.)IST)

PPPEAC Members,
 Prof. Minjie Chen at Princeton Univ. has invited a speaker from Google to talk about the challenges in high-performance high-frequency power delivery for state of the art microprocessors.  Details have been posted below. If this is your first time attending a PPPEAC event, please click  the registration link to join the group.  Hope you can make it!
Talk Title:      Power Integrity: Ensuring Robust End-to-End Power Delivery
Date:              Monday, Feb 15, 2021
Time:             4:30 – 5:30 p.m.
Zoom link:     https://princeton.zoom.us/j/99499632211?pwd=Qm4wWFFWSUFyMjJVQ3lseFh1TGNyUT09

Abstract: A robust power delivery solution for high-performance microprocessors (xPUs, FPGA, ASIC etc.) requires voltage at the active junction to be within the specified range to ensure timing closure, and also requires the VR and PDN to support ever increasingly complex power management features. The source of power comes from conversion circuitry which usually transforms higher voltage to a much more granularly regulated form lower than 1V DC in most cases, and then is distributed through board, package and on-die network and decoupling all the way to the active circuits. In the past, power designers and signal/power integrity engineers have worked together to address the conversion and distribution challenges in frequencies ranging from KHz to GHz, but the methodologies used by the two groups are decoupled. In today’s high-performance computing processors, many of which are used in machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud applications, we have seen transformations of computing architecture that result in changes in power demand signatures, and thus call for new ways of power delivery solution. To address these new challenges, a holistic approach that combines power conversion together with power integrity design becomes a must. In this presentation, we will explore the risks and opportunities in this area and share our considerations in practical designs.
 
Bio: Houle Gan received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2010. He is currently a Staff Hardware Engineer at Google, where he leads the power delivery solutions of Google’s custom machine-learning platforms. Before that he was with Apple and Intel. His research interests include signal/power integrity, power management techniques, and advanced packaging. He is the recipient of the 2013 IEEE AP-S best paper award of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, and has over 30 IEEE publications in peer reviewed journals and conferences.

IEEE Princeton/Philadelphia PELS Chapter: https://ieee-pppeac.org/
Contact Info: Minjie Chen, minjie@princeton.edu or Ping Wang, ping.wang@princeton.edu

Past conferences:

The Eleventh Annual Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition:  September 29, 2019  in Baltimore, MD.  See link below:

IEEE ENERGY CONVERSION CONGRESS & EXPO

To:

Dr. Grant Pitel, Chair, IEEE Princeton/Central Jersey & Philadelphia Joint Section PELS/IAS Joint Societies Chapter

Cc:

Prof. Georges Zissis, IAS President

Cc:

R-1, R-2 and IAS Officers

Dear Dr. Pitel,

Referring to the approval announcement below, please accept my sincere congratulations on official formation of your chapter. Your chapter became the 427th IAS chapter in series worldwide.

Your Chapter is a very special one since most probably this is the first triple Joint IAS Chapter i.e. Joint Regions, Joint Sections, Joint Societies IAS Chapter. I guess, this issue was the background of the MGA update, too. They were also confusing about the geo-code, i.e. are the chapter the 189th in R-2 or the 279th in R-1. Please note your geo-code CH01279.

Please check the correctness of your chapter entry in our roster, https://ias.ieee.org/chapters-membership/chapters-by-region.html >>>IAS Chapters by Region.