Event
ECE Colloquium Series - Jorge Vega, Northrop Grumman
Friday, February 13, 2026
3:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building, Room 1110
Darcy Long
301 405 3114
dlong123@umd.edu
Speaker: Jorge Vega, Power Electronics Engineer
Title: "Space Power Electronics: GaN, Magnetics, and Design Discipline in Architecture Tradeoffs"
Abstract: Space power electronics is essential because every spacecraft function, from communications and navigation to sensing, computing, and propulsion depends on stable, efficient, and a reliable power source. Unlike terrestrial systems, space hardware must operate through launch vibration, radiation, and extreme thermal environments for years with limited opportunities for recovery, so power conversion reliability is mission-critical.
This talk provides an engineer’s view of how architecture tradeoffs and design discipline shape robust power conversion for space systems. I will discuss why wide bandgap devices such as GaN can expand the feasible design space enabling higher switching frequency and improved thermal margins, while shifting difficulty toward dv/dt & di/dt management, gate margin, and regulation, especially at low line where minimum on-time and volt-second limits appear. I will then focus on magnetics, highlighting why the physics is universal but the discipline differs in the derating philosophy, thermal margin, and qualification mindset. Finally, I will outline why planar magnetics are often favored for repeatability and predictable parasitics, and I will close with a reusable analysis approach for thinking about converter dynamics and identifying “what assumptions break” at corner conditions.
Bio: Jorge Vega earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and two master’s degrees, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Microelectronics and Photonics from the University of Arkansas. He is an analog and power electronics engineer with about 15 years of experience in power conversion and high-reliability design, with prior engineering roles at Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, ThermoFisher Scientific, and Silanna Semiconductor. Since 2020, Jorge has been with Northrop Grumman in the space sector, where he is a technical lead for satellite power supply development, focusing on isolated power architectures, custom magnetics, and radiation-tolerant component selection.
