News

At the FREEDM Systems Research Center, some of the state’s brightest minds are leading the way to improve how we power our lives.

On Friday, President Joe Biden’s top adviser on science and technology visited North Carolina State University to see firsthand how students are creating cleaner and more efficient energy systems.

Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd, a unit of Chicago-based energy provider Exelon Corp), in partnership with North Carolina State University’s FREEDM Systems Center, has been awarded a $200,000 federal research and development grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE) to help fund a $5m research project focused on improving the efficiency of, and reducing the cost of, extreme fast charging (XFC) for electric vehicles (EVs).

The new law includes $13.2 billion for research and the training of people to work in the development, design and manufacturing of semiconductor wafers and the chips that are built on them. The R&D funding could be a boon to North Carolina’s research universities, especially N.C. State. John Muth, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, said other states dominate in the design and production of silicon-based chips, but N.C. State is at the forefront of developing a new generation of silicon carbide semiconductors that can endure higher temperatures and higher voltages, qualities that will be increasingly needed in electric automobiles, data processing centers and clean energy production. “In general, we need to do more manufacturing, do it cleaner and employ people with better paying jobs and the CHIPS Act helps out with that,” he said.

Governments, businesses and universities worldwide are spending heavily to prepare for quantum. And in the past few years, the three corners of North Carolina’s Research Triangle—Duke University, North Carolina State University, and UNC—have each made distinct contributions to this emerging field, turning the state into a legitimate quantum hot spot.