The Institute of Microelectronic Systems (IMS) congratulates its PhD students Joseph Winkler and Saurabh Kale on their successful contributions at the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) 2026, held from March 22-26, 2026, in San Antonio, Texas, USA, where Joseph Winkler was honored with two Best Presentation Awards for his outstanding research contributions. At the world’s largest power electronics conference with over 6,000 attendees, both researchers presented their latest work to an international audience from academia and industry.
Joseph Winkler was recognized with a Best Presentation Award for his paper “Increasing Power Density in 48V DC-DC Converters Using Vertically Integrated 3D Glass Power Bricks for Data Center Applications,” which was co-authored by student Torben Rumpf. The work presents a vertically integrated 3D power brick module that stacks GaN FETs, isolation ICs, and passives within a glass interposer to significantly improve volumetric utilization and reduce footprint. Such approaches enable highly compact, efficient 48 V power delivery solutions, supporting next-generation AI data centers.
Joseph Winkler received yet another Best Presentation Award for his poster “Maximizing Capacitance Density in 48V DC-DC Converters: An MLCC Selection Guide.” Jonas Niemeyer contributed to this work as a student co-author. The poster provides circuit designers with a practical, bias-aware selection methodology and curated dataset to identify MLCCs with the highest usable capacitance under real operating conditions. Such approaches simplify component selection and enable more compact, high-performance converter designs by directly translating measurement data into actionable design decisions.
Saurabh Kale presented the paper “A 1 kW, 6.78 MHz GaN Series-Series WPT Using 3D Packaging for Low Parasitic and Thermal Integration Achieving 2 kW/in³”. His work presents innovative packaging techniques to achieve a high degree of integration of high-voltage, multi-MHz, kW-class switching converters without compromising electrical and thermal performance. This enables the deployment of compact and scalable converters without the overhead of active cooling, as demonstrated in an example application for wireless charging of AGVs.
Joseph Winkler and Saurabh Kale are pursuing their PhD at IMS under the supervision of Prof. Bernhard Wicht in the Mixed-Signal Circuits (MX) research group. The IMS team congratulates Joseph and Saurabh on the presentation and this outstanding achievement, and looks forward to the continued contributions to the fields of high-performance microelectronics and high-performance computing power supply.
