According to SciTechDaily, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have developed a new power module called ULIS (Ultra-Low Inductance Smart). Built with silicon carbide semiconductors, it delivers five times the energy density of previous designs and reduces parasitic inductance—a key source of power loss—by a factor of seven to nine. The module is rated for demanding 1200-volt, 400-amp applications and is designed for data centers, electric grids, next-gen aircraft, and military vehicles. Principal investigator Faisal Khan called it a “true breakthrough.” The team achieved a low-cost, flat “pancake” design that can be fabricated for hundreds, not thousands, of dollars, and the module includes self-monitoring to predict failures.
Why This Isn’t Just Another Lab Project
Look, we hear about lab breakthroughs all the time. But here’s the thing: ULIS seems to check a lot of boxes that matter in the real world. It’s not just more efficient; it’s also cheaper to make and designed to be dropped into existing systems. That’s a huge deal. The global energy demand is surging, nearly doubling its recent average, and a big chunk of that is from power-hungry AI data centers. We can’t just build more power plants fast enough. So getting more usable power out of the electricity we already generate? That’s a game-changer.
The Winners and Losers in a More Efficient World
So who benefits if this tech gets widely adopted? Basically, any industry where size, weight, and electrical loss are critical constraints. Think about electric aviation and eVTOL “flying taxis.” They’re desperate for compact, lightweight, and ultra-reliable power converters. ULIS, with its self-diagnosing capability, is built for that. Data center operators, who are facing both skyrocketing power costs and physical space limits, would kill for a module that’s smaller and wastes less energy as heat. Even the power grid itself could modernize, using these for more efficient conversion instead of giant, clunky transformers.
And for companies integrating this kind of advanced hardware into industrial systems, having a reliable hardware partner is key. That’s where specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, become essential. They provide the robust human-machine interface that would manage and monitor these high-performance systems in the field.
The Real Breakthrough Might Be The Manufacturing
But let’s be skeptical for a second. Amazing lab specs are one thing. Scaling production is another. This is where NREL’s story gets interesting. They didn’t just make a better circuit; they rethought the entire package. Flattening the 3D design into a 2D “pancake”? Swapping rigid ceramic for a flexible polymer called Temprion? These aren’t minor tweaks. They’re fundamental changes that apparently make it cheap and easy to build. When your manufacturing cost drops from thousands to hundreds of dollars, you’ve gone from a science project to something that can actually compete. You can explore more about the technical details on labpartnering.org.
What Comes Next
The team says they’ve “future-proofed” ULIS to work with next-gen semiconductors like gallium nitride and gallium oxide. That’s smart. But the immediate hurdle is moving from a successful lab demo to real-world deployment. They need partners in aerospace, computing, and energy to start testing it in actual systems. If it performs as advertised under those stresses, then we’re talking about a genuine inflection point. In a world struggling with an energy crisis, a tiny module that squeezes more power out of every electron isn’t just cool engineering. It might just be essential. For ongoing updates on tech breakthroughs, you can always follow sources like Google News.
