B. Jayant Baliga received his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, in 1971 and 1974, respectively. He spent 15 years at the General Electric R&D Center, Schenectady, NY, leading their power device effort and was bestowed the highest rank of Coolidge Fellow for inventing, developing and commercializing the IGBT. It is now utilized in all sectors of the economy, including electric vehicles and renewable energy generation. He derived the Baliga’s-Figure-of-Merit (BFOM) in 1979 that is widely used for wide band gap semiconductor power devices. He joined North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 1988 as a Full Professor and was promoted to Distinguished University Professor in 1997 and subsequently Progress Energy Distinguished University Professor. He has founded four start-up companies with successful products while at NCSU. Dr. Baliga has authored 28 books and over 750 publications in international journals and conference digests. He is the author of the textbook Fundamentals of Power Semiconductor Devices (Springer, 2018), now in its second edition, and three Springer monographs: Advanced High Voltage Power Device Concepts (2012), Advanced Power MOSFET Concepts (2010), and Advanced Power Rectifier Concepts (2009). President Obama honored him with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 at the White House and he is the recipient of the highest IEEE recognition, the Medal of Honor in 2014, the Global Energy Prize in 2015, and the Millennium Technology Prize in 2024. He holds 124 U.S. patents and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame as the sole inventor of the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) in 2016. Ajit Kanale is a Power Applications Engineer in the Advanced Power Applications Group at Wolfspeed Inc. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in Avionics from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, India. In 2012, he was posted as a Satellite Engineer in the Indian Space Research Organization’s satellite mission control facility in Bangalore, managing remote sensing and scientific satellite missions. In 2016, he moved to Raleigh, NC, to pursue graduate studies at North Carolina State University. He obtained his Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering in 2019, with a thesis on short-circuit characterization of the 1.2 kV Silicon Carbide JBSFET device under the joint guidance of Prof. B. Jayant Baliga and Prof. Subhashish Bhattacharya. From 2018 to 2022, with the same advisors, he pursued doctoral research on the BaSIC topology to improve short-circuit ruggedness of power devices. In addition, he also assisted in characterizing several innovative 650 V and 1.2 kV SiC power MOSFET and JBSFET device designs, including the Split-Gate, Buffered-Gate, Hexagonal-cell MOSFETs, and the BiDirectional FET (BiDFET).
