SiC Power Devices for Next Generation Energy Efficiency

Silicon carbide (SiC) materials technology has made rapid advances in recent years. While increasing the wafer diameter from 75 mm to 100 mm, the substrate quality has been greatly improved with much reduced defect density, resulting in higher device yields. Cree is poised to increase the wafer diameter to 150 mm in 2012, which will further reduce the cost of SiC devices. SiC Schottky diodes have demonstrated very high reliability in the field and are being extensively used in Switch Mode Power Supplies (SMPS), and solar inverters, and other applications. Cree has also commercially released a 1200 V, 20 A SiC MOSFET which has been used in solar inverter along with SiC Schottky diode to provide an efficiency gain of 2.36%. More recent R&D results at Cree indicate that the on-resistance of the MOSFET can be reduced by 2x, which will further improve performance and reduce cost