Silicon carbide and other wide bandgap materials have made a breakthrough in the automotive industry, providing significant power losses reduction compared to traditional silicon chips while enabling smaller components for electric vehicles, leading to more effective energy management, lighter batteries and longer driving ranges.
Improved Electrical Conductivity
Silicon has long been the go-to semiconductor material in electronics, yet its limited performance restricts many applications. Wide bandgap semiconductor materials offer higher breakdown voltages and temperatures of operation that enable more effective power electronics performance.
Silicon carbide offers 10x the breakdown electric field strength of silicon, enabling a thinner active zone and increased dopant incorporation in high voltage devices with lower series resistances ranging from 600V up to thousands of V. Additionally, this material makes possible to configure more power devices that support different withstand voltage ranges–from 600V up to thousands of V withstand voltages.
Silicon carbide also features low concentrations of charge carriers at room temperature. While this might not seem important at first, its significance in high temperature operations becomes clear: silicon devices often cease functioning at certain temperatures due to thermally liberated electrons adding charge carriers intrinsic to them; with silicon carbide however, this problem doesn’t present itself because its lower carrier concentration means devices can continue working reliably up to 250C or 300C temperatures.
Due to these benefits, industry players are scrambling to bring silicon carbide production online as quickly as possible. One such partnership is between Roseville Fab and onsemi who have agreed to supply 6-inch (150mm) wafers of silicon carbide power chips for its customers in the EV market.
Better Heat Dissipation
Silicon is widely recognized as a semiconductor of choice in electronics devices, yet even this material has its limitations. Thus there has been growing interest in wide bandgap materials like SiC that overcome those restrictions to allow electronics to be smaller, run faster, and function at higher temperatures and voltages.
SiC has a much higher energy gap than silicon (3.26eV versus 1.6eV), enabling it to withstand much higher temperatures, voltages, and currents with greater ease, thus making SiC-based electronic components smaller, lighter and consuming less power – contributing towards increasing system efficiency.
High-voltage SiC devices not only offer more efficient performance, but they also boast greater reliability compared to silicon alternatives. This is due to the way silicon carbide chips dissipate heat much more effectively – helping reduce risk of device overheating failure and prolong operating lives of electronic components such as MOSFETs and Schottky diodes.
SiC is already being utilized in many high-end applications such as electric vehicles (EV), solar inverters, and industrial motor drives. Demand for these devices has seen exponential growth, leading supply to outstrip demand; to meet that challenge, Onsemi has expanded their vertical integration practices in order to ensure an uninterrupted supply of quality silicon carbide power devices – including EliteSiC power modules with full SiC MOSFETs from bare die solutions all the way through to gel-encapsulated case modules and transfer molded modules – onsemi’s vertical integration is helping ensure an uninterrupted supply of quality silicon carbide power devices. Onsemi also has expanded vertically integrated their vertical integration efforts ensuring an uninterrupted supply. Learn three compelling reasons to choose Onsemi EliteSiC power modules from bare die solutions to gel-encapsulated case modules with full SiC MOSFETs all featuring full SiC MOSFETs!
Lower Weight
Silicon carbide chips offer higher temperatures, voltages and frequencies than their silicon semiconductor counterparts, making them suitable for high performance applications such as power electronics for terrestrial electric vehicles or space exploration instruments such as rovers or probes (Mantooth, Zetterling & Rusu).
Silicon batteries deliver greater energy efficiency than their silicon counterparts, with losses reduced by up to 50 % resulting in more energy for motor driving the vehicle and longer range on single battery charge.
Silicon carbide power semiconductors have become an attractive option for electric vehicle OEMs (OEMs). Bosch recently announced their intention to mass produce SiC chips that power EV inverters and converters – improving quality, reliability, efficiency while simultaneously decreasing size and weight.
At Reutlingen’s plant in Germany, an engineering team led by 26-year-old Allison Suba from Roseville is busy preparing for full production to resume. They’re familiarizing themselves with new processes, mounting wafers onto frames for processing in a dicing machine and inspecting for defects.
The company plans to transition from 150-millimeter wafers currently used for production, which allows them to manufacture more chips per production run and realize significant economies of scale while decreasing time to market for new chips.
Higher Efficiency
Silicon carbide chips are an integral component of electromobility. Their use in electric vehicle range extension by lowering power losses and increasing efficiency has proved fruitful; additionally they improve IT infrastructure energy efficiency by eliminating cooling systems thus saving space, weight, and costs.
Semiconductors are materials that exhibit both conducting (like copper electrical wiring) and insulating behaviors depending on voltage or light intensity. Silicon carbide’s wide bandgap makes it more efficient at moving electrical current than traditional silicon semiconductors, making it suitable for power electronics such as traction inverters for electric vehicles as well as DC/DC converters used by data centers, air conditioners, and chargers.
SiC is notable for its superior heat dissipation compared to silicon chips, meaning it can operate reliably at higher temperatures without overheating. Silicon chips typically reach their limits between 250C and 300C while SiC chips have been tested operating reliably at temperatures as high as 500C.
SiC is currently being utilized in server power supplies and consumer electronics that demand high performance at elevated operating temperatures, including server power supplies for servers. Their increased efficiency helps reduce power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across the global economy. Over time, silicon carbide will enable replacement technology with lighter alternatives that offer lower operating costs and longer lifespans than existing technology currently on the market.
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