Design Aspects and Environmental Impacts of Wide Band Gap Based Semiconductor Technology in Chargers for Electronic Devices

This paper discusses the work from PECTA Task B, Energy and environmental related Life Cycle Assessment, conducted between January 2022 and February 2023. In particular  we focused on "consumer" chargers for electronic devices such as laptops, notebooks and mobile phones. We investigated two main areas: first, the effects of incorporating Gallium Nitride (GaN) components for energy conversion on the product design; and second, the resulting environmental impacts along the life cycle of the chargers.

We discuss the effects of using Wide Band Gap at the product design and structure, e.g., the impact of incorporating GaN transistors. A streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was completed for a reference 65W Silicon based laptop charger, and a novel 65W GaN based multi-charger.

You can read about the bill of materials and the energy measurements of the two chargers which we used for the inventory, the impact assessment and the discussion of results in the full paper, which is available here.  

More information about our work in 4E PECTA and many other projects is available in our project references.