Mr Kimimori Hamada from Toyota Motor Corporation delivered a lecture to EE students on June 22. In his lecture, “Toyota's Challenge of Applying SiC Power Semiconductors to Environmentally Friendly Vehicles”, Mr Hamada introduced that the automotive industry was developing a range of electrically powered environmentally friendly vehicles such as hybrid (HV), plug-in hybrid (PHV), full electric (EV), and fuel cell (FCV) vehicles to help reduce tailpipe CO2 emissions and achieve energy diversification. HVs were now regarded as one of the most practical types of environmentally friendly vehicle and had already been widely accepted by the market, according to Mr Hamada. Toyota Motor Corporation has positioned HV systems as a core technology that could be applied to all nextgeneration electrically powered environmentally friendly vehicles and is currently working to enhance the performance of HV system components. Due to its low loss operation properties, silicon carbide (SiC) power devices are regarded as highly promising next generation power semiconductor devices to help improve fuel efficiency and reduce the size and weight of the power control unit (PCU), one of the key components of a HV system. Mr Hamada’s presentation showed the development of practical automotive technologies using SiC by three members of the Toyota group: Toyota Motor Corporation itself, DENSO Corporation, and Toyota Central R&D Labs., Inc. In more detail, the presentation covered topics such as SiC power semiconductor device developments and the trial on-board application of SiC devices to Prius, Camry and FC bus which featured both fuel cell technology and hybrid technology.
Kimimori Hamada was born in Osaka, Japan in 1959. He received the B.Eng. degree in 1982 and the M.Eng. degree in 1985 both in electrical engineering from Osaka Prefecture University, Japan. In 1985 he joined Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) in Aichi, Japan. In 1987 he was involved in the in-house semiconductor project in TMC. He was in charge of the Si device developments such as Power MOSFETs, IGBTs, and BiCDMOS technologies. He was a division general manager of semiconductor development division from 2009 to 2014. He is now Project General Manager of developments of SiC, GaN and their power modules. He has been a member of the Research Committee on the power devices and ICs in IEEJ, a chair of research committee of automotive power electronics in JSAE and a member of the EDS Power Devices and ICs Technical Committee in IEEE. He served on ISPSD 2013 Technical Program Committee Chair and serves on JSAE EVTeC 2014 & APE Japan 2014 Vice Chairperson.
