New era of power electronics by SiC power devices evolution

Silicon carbide (SiC) power devices offer significant advantages for power electronics such as improved efficiency, reduced size and weight of electric systems. Such benefits are realized by its superior material properties of higher electric field breakdown and higher thermal conductivity compared to silicon and recent technological improvements in SiC substrate quality and device performance. By using wide bandgap semiconductor such as SiC, the unipolar devices are available in the power device application area over 600V while silicon requires the bipolar devices such as pn junction or IGBT. The unipolar devices of Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) and MOSFETs realize the fast switching and resulting lower switching losses due to quite less stored charges. Mass production of SiC-MOSFET and Full SiC Power Module has finally started in 2010 and 2012, respectively. New era of power electronics has been just opened by SiC power devices.