Introduction: Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Silicon Carbide (SiC) have excellent material physical properties for third-generation semiconductors, providing greater room for improving the performance of power electronic devices. As the most basic semiconductor component of the power supply system, SiC power devices have greatly improved power and energy efficiency in a wide range of military and civilian application scenarios, such as electric vehicles, high-speed rail, solar and wind energy grid connection, UPS uninterruptible power supply, electromagnetic ejection and other fields, and have become the new favorite of the new energy market.    
           

Chat before the beginning

The importance of third-generation half-power devices is to increase power, enhance efficiency, and reduce size, which cannot be bypassed. The country is gradually paying more attention to the semiconductor field, and the capital market is also beginning to pay attention. Especially in the ongoing trade war, everyone is even more aware of the importance of independent production of power devices. Just like the necessary equipment in the game, in order to synthesize artifacts, the element of power devices is a topic that cannot be avoided no matter what. Nowadays, domestic teams in the third-generation half-power device sector have also emerged and are extremely lively. Among them, Pinejie Company has produced silicon carbide power devices with excellent performance.  
Let’s formally talk about the aspects of SiC’s excellent performance.  
           

Loss value of power device

The important indicator of the performance of a power device is nothing more than its total loss, which consists of two parts. One isconduction loss(Conduction Loss) One isswitching losses(Switching Loss). In other words, the lower the loss, the higher the efficiency, resulting in smaller size, higher efficiency and lighter weight, which is more suitable for modern application needs. For example, one of the important reasons why Tesla Model 3 was able to reduce the price to around 250,000 is because they used a SiC solution, which improved battery performance and reduced size and weight, thus reducing other costs.

In order to help application vendors and capital parties understand how power semiconductor devices and their main parameters are compared and evaluated in the industry, we will compare each one horizontally and briefly comment on the technical advantages and disadvantages of each company's SiC MOSFET device products below.  
           

                           派恩杰参数领先

In the older generation of power electronics applications, due to the low switching frequency, conduction loss plays a dominant role. An originator of this industry and an academician of the National Academy of SciencesProfessor Jayant B. Baliga(hereinafter referred to as Bashen) As early as 1989, a quality factor to evaluate the conduction loss of power devices was proposed

(see [i]), ε where is the dielectric constant of the semiconductor material, μ is the electron mobility,E_Cis the breakdown electric field. According to Bashen's formula, if we take the BFM factor of silicon material as 1 unit, then the BFM factor of SiC material is 231 units. What's the point? This shows that when making multi-sub power devices (MOSFETs, Schottky diodes, etc.) with the same high voltage, the on-resistance of SiC materials is 230 times smaller! This means that the conduction loss of SiC devices is 230 times smaller than that of silicon devices under the same current! The normalized BFM of GaN relative to silicon is 2097, and that of Ga2O3 is 6170! To sum it up in layman’s terms, Ba Shen predicted as early as the 1980s,The future of power semiconductors must be dominated by wide bandgap semiconductors！
 

 

Picture i
 
 

Jayant B. Baliga   
With the development of power electronics technology in the past 20 years, people have found that higher switching frequency of switches can reduce the use of passive components such as capacitors and inductors in the circuit, and reduce the volume and weight of the system. However, as the system frequency increases, the switching losses of power devices become increasingly significant, and the cost and volume of the required cooling system also increase accordingly, resulting in the system being unable to be significantly optimized by further increasing the frequency. Another famous professor,Alex Q. Huang, in 2004, proposed a quality factor that comprehensively evaluates device conduction loss and switching loss.

(see [ii]), where R_ds,onis the on-resistance of the device, proportional to the conduction loss, Q_gdIt is the charge stored in the gate-to-drain Miller capacitance of the device and is proportional to the switching loss. At the same time, because R_ds,onInversely proportional to the device area, Q_gdProportional to the device area, their product just offsets the impact of the device area (or cost), showing the overall loss level of the device under high-frequency operation. In layman’s terms, the smaller the HDFM quality factor, the better the overall quality of the device.The smaller the loss, the higher the efficiency ！
 
 

Alex Q. Huang  
Using this method, let’s compare the product performance of major SiC MOSFET suppliers on the market:
     

factory	Infineon	Italian law	Corey	Roma	Pine Jay	A domestic brand
Origin	Europe	Europe	USA	Japan	China	China
Technology platform	first generation trench	second generation plane	third generation plane	third generation trench	third generation plane	No.? generation plane
Rds,on (m?)	90	60	75	80	80	80
Qgd (nC)	5	35	20	25	9.3	54
	21.2	45.8	38.7	44.7	27.3	65.7
Normalized HDFM	1	2.16	1.83	2.11	1.29	3.10
*The above data comes from a publicly downloadable datasheet on the Internet.

Let’s first draw conclusions through this comparison table.In planar MOS technology, as a domestic brand, Pinejie Semiconductor's products are already world-leading, and are very close to the trench MOS technology with complex processes!Under ideal circumstances, for the same application scenario, if Infineon's latest CoolSiC device is used as a benchmark, and the overall power consumption of the device is at least 10W, the power consumption of Penjie's SiC MOSFET is 12.9W, the power consumption of Kerui's products is 18.3W, the power consumption of STMicroelectronics and Rohm is close to 21W, and the power consumption of a domestic brand is 31W.

Conclusion

Driven by the electrification of transportation vehicles, new infrastructure and other projects, silicon carbide devices will become the focus of the strategic layout of major power plants. Tesla fully cooperates with STMicroelectronics, and Volkswagen embraces Corey... Power plants that can seize the latest technology and production capacity of SiC power devices will gain incomparable strategic advantages.

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