The University of Arkansas is a world leader in power electronics. Researchers develop systems for hybrid airplanes, embed electronics and drills that go deep into the earth and improve the grid that delivers power to our homes.
This month on Short Talks From the Hill, Alan Mantooth, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science, speaks with Todd Price about his role as executive director of the Arkansas Research Institute for Electronic Systems, or ARIES, a new institute that brings together the university’s work on power electronics.
Mantooth: Power electronics, in contrast to consumer electronics, manages higher voltage, higher current, higher power, often higher temperature, even. We work with Caterpillar and John Deere, for example, also aircraft. We also work on grid modernization. So it’s the protection gear. It’s the solid-state power transformers.
You see these big green transformers on your lawn. That’s stepping the voltage down from the grid to send it to your house. Those are a lot of iron and steel and an oil inside to keep them cool. We build them out of solid state and it gives them more rapid reaction capability and a lot of other functions that can perform other than simply stepping down the voltage.
Price: And I know a lot of what you do is working with less common materials, developing new materials. When we talk about technology in general, so often we talk about silicon and it’s become synonymous with technology, Silicon Valley, but that’s not what you’re working with, right? So what do you typically and the other researchers work with, and why are you not using silicon? What’s going on there?
Mantooth: Great question. When you think about materials, they’re the foundation of life. I mean, we even name the ages of mankind, the Bronze Age, the Stone Age. We’re living in the Silicon Age. There’s no question about it because of the pervasiveness of silicon electronics.
But for the things that we do, we need something that is more rugged than silicon, and silicon carbide. By adding some carbon to the silicon lattice, we make silicon carbide, an alloy essentially, that still can be a semiconductor.
And as a result, there are other materials that we work with that allow us to operate at very cold temperatures, very high temperatures and these extreme voltages and currents. They just have different properties than silicon, where silicon wouldn’t survive the environment so well.
Price: And so what are some situations where we have these very high temperatures or these very low temperatures or these very high amounts of power?
Mantooth: Well, the high temperatures are probably the quickest and easiest. Energy exploration is one, deep well drilling, if you’re, for example, wanting to build a new geothermal generator. And people are doing this right now for all this data center euphoria that’s taking place. That’s an area where the hotter it gets, you’re getting closer to the Earth’s center. So that gets very hot.
Others is industrial processes. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, take a steel mill or a chemical plant. A lot of these are very energy-intensive and often hot processes because heat is used to drive the chemical reaction or is used to melt the iron into, and to making steel.
As a result, these processes are not necessarily monitored as carefully as they can be with more advanced high-temperature electronics. Silicon, it wouldn’t survive, but silicon carbide can go well up to 800 degrees C. So you’re talking about eight times boiling, where these electronics still survive and actually thrive. And we’re able to measure things and control things at those temperatures.
Another is a natural gas turbine. Natural gas turbines are what we’re generating electricity with. So natural gas comes in, it’s fired up. It spins a turbine, generates electricity. Well, if you want to maintain these turbines, they have to take them down every so often. And when you take them down, you typically take them down for like a month and do service on them.
What we’re able to put sensors and electronics inside the turbine to monitor its health and only take it down when that maintenance is required, because the lost revenue of having a natural gas turbine decommissioned for a month is about $30 million, or a million dollars a day. And so you want to keep them up as much as possible.
Price: So those are all extremely hot context. When would you have a very cold context?
Mantooth: Well, the latest aircraft designs are hydrogen-based. And so if you think about a hydrogen, it’s a cryogen and it’s in its liquid state. You’re at 20 kelvin. And so since you have this cryogen available, that’s the fuel for the aircraft. Since you have it available, you cool the electronics and they’re more efficient.
So if you can cool electronics down to these, you can get them to almost superconducting capability. So no resistance. And as a result, very efficient, very highly efficient. And so these are examples of when very cold.
And the other is space exploration. When we go to outer space, it’s cold. And so you want something that’s impervious to radiation and it also manages the cold temperatures.
Price: So the University of Arkansas is recognized around the world as one of the top research programs in electronics and power electronics. You and your colleagues have built that reputation over the last 20 years. How did that happen? How did it come about? How much of that was a plan? How much of that was luck and seizing opportunities?
Mantooth: Yes, there is opportunism in there, there’s no question. But we planned it back in 2003 when the big Northeast blackout occurred. There was an outage that began in Ohio, and it spread throughout the northeast part of the United States, and millions were without power.
And when we saw that, we thought, electronics is the solution to this. Instead of having these mechanical breakers and these things that once you shed the load and you overload another generator, it just continues to cascade and the failure just keeps cascading. And that’s what happened. We said, “We can do better.”
And so that was the inspiration behind starting the UA Power Group. And we started with four faculty and our students and started working together. And as a result, we started focusing on grid modernization first. But while we were at it, we started discovering that electrified transportation was going to be a coming thing as well. And so we grew there.
And so through a succession of centers and big projects with Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, ARPA-E when it got formed and so forth, we started building up our program. By 2015, we were 15 faculty, and now here in 2026, we’re 27, working together to solve bigger problems that involve power and energy and its management in various application domains.
Price: Let’s talk about that fab, the fabrication facility, right, what that means. So in November, you opened the Multi-User Silicon Carbide Facility, which we all call MUSiC, right? And my understanding is there’s nothing else like it in the world. So what is it and why is it so unique?
Mantooth: That’s a great question, because when you say it’s unique and people say, “Well, there’s fabs everywhere and there’s other silicon carbide fabs. Why is it unique?” Well, the uniqueness is not just in the material we process.
What’s unique about it is that we built at a university a production-level facility that could ramp to volumes, but we’re purposely restricting ourselves to that bridge to high-volume manufacturing as a low-volume prototyping facility.
All the creative juices in our country wanting to do research in this area and prototype new ideas, they have no place to do this now. They have a place for that creativity to be exercised. And that’s not just at Arkansas. That’s investigators all across the country and, in fact, the world. There’ll be people wanting to use this facility to prototype their ideas.
There’s a pre-commercial or pre-production version. It’s like when you go to an automotive show, you see pre-production versions of new cars. These are ones that are being tried out and they’re being tested with their market and so forth. And that’s what you have to do with semiconductors, too. And so we are the place where those pre-production versions are built and a lot of problems are wrung out, and then they go to high-volume manufacturing. That’s a unique part.
We’re coupling that with the mission of the state of Arkansas and University of Arkansas in particular, and that is producing students and research and development, advancing the field.
So we have a threefold mission, the fundamental science and advancing the field, R&D, workforce development, providing a second-to-none education for our students. And then that low-volume prototyping, which is that unique part that allows people to come to us, express their ideas. We protect their IP, their intellectual property, and then we prototype their ideas, and then they can go to places like X-Fab Texas in Lubbock and build these things at scale. And they’re building products at that point.
Price: What does it mean for researchers and students here that all these incredibly creative people, all these people on the cutting edge, are physically going to be coming to Arkansas, to Fayetteville with their ideas and not only doing the work, but being here and talking to people around the table, the casual stuff as well?
Mantooth: Just think of the Land of Opportunity, scholarship, opportunity. It gives our students opportunities. Our talent is being exposed to all of these organizations. I’m being asked more and more, “Do you have a student that can do this? Do you have a student that can do that?” And they’re wanting to hire our students.
So it’s opportunities for our students because they see that our students are getting this unique education and can have a great impact on their business.
Price: All this work certainly benefits the University of Arkansas. It bolsters our reputation. It brings in grants. It attracts high-quality students and faculty. How is it also benefiting the state more broadly of Arkansas?
Mantooth: It’s benefiting the state in probably two different distinct ways. One, we’re doing our dead-level best to bring to all four corners of the state the message that this educational opportunity is on your doorstep.
We want young people around the state of Arkansas to understand that the University of Arkansas has, over a 20-year period, developed a very unique capability that affords you opportunities. And the second part of that is that those opportunities, you don’t have to go to California to have a job.
The second thing is economic impact and the growth of business in Arkansas. That talent that gets an education in Arkansas can work in Arkansas.
And so those are the two things that will have an influence over the state of Arkansas, is giving our young people or people who want to retrain in their career, giving them an opportunity to get education in this area, but also to have a job in our state.
And we’re attracting more businesses. We’ve already had two companies who will be opening up offices who have never had a presence in Arkansas, opening up offices in Northwest Arkansas as a result of the MUSiC facility opening up. And we expect that to grow to even more. So that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
That’s an excerpt from the most recent episode of the Short Talks From the Hill podcast. We heard host Todd Price speaking with Alan Mantooth, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and executive director of the new Arkansas Research Institute for Electronic Systems, or ARIES.
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