Sustainable Energy, SiC Devices and Power Design
Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio
Content Editor & Technical Writer | Ph.D in Physics | Power Electronics, Wide Bandgap, Renewable Energy, Embedded Systems, Quantum Computing
Consider how many man-made disasters we’ve had to cope with in the last 50 years — Chernobyl is one of them. Now we’re dealing with a potentially more serious issue: climate change. The pace with which climate change is unfolding makes it more hazardous and devious than any previous disaster. Its consequences have been felt for decades, despite many academics having used predictive models to anticipate them. Its consequences are intensifying, speeding up, and eroding the foundation of our ecology. Now is the moment to act: If we do nothing, extreme weather will become the norm, wreaking havoc on our ecosystem and resulting in the extinction of entire species. Not only that, but a rise in sea levels will lead to population displacement, resulting in political instability.
Hassane El-Khoury, president and CEO of onsemi, noted in his opening during the PowerUP Expo the scientific aspects that demonstrate with data how evolution is increasingly worrying and important decisions that need to be made.
“Our responsibility as a technical community and as innovative engineers is to take action to do something,” said El-Khoury. “Oil, natural gas, and coal have been the largest contributors to CO2?emissions, making up about 83% of the global emissions problem. That is billions of metric tons emitted by these markets alone. But suppose you analyze the carbon footprint that these industries contribute to our environment. In that case, you find that if we maintain and do nothing, the budget — that is, this 1.5?C that we all believe is the threshold to maintain — will be exceeded by 2030. And if you think 2030 is too far away, it is eight years from now — not even a design cycle for a car that we are familiar with. So in 2030, the actions we take today and the projects we are working on today are the projects that will help us maintain our competitiveness. "
Non-CMOS-Compatible SiC Power Device Fabrication in Volume Si Fabs
By Victor Veliadis
领英推荐
Silicon carbide devices are displacing their incumbent silicon counterparts in several high-volume power applications. As SiC market share continues to grow, the industry is lifting the last barriers to mass commercialization that include higher-than-Si-device cost, relative lack of wafer planarity, the presence of basal plane dislocations, reliability and ruggedness concerns, and the need for a workforce skilled in SiC power technology to keep up with the rising demand. To enable cost-effective SiC manufacturing, high-yielding fabrication processes are required. In my PowerUP presentation, I will summarize key aspects of SiC fabrication technology and outline non-CMOS-compatible processes that have been streamlined to allow for mass SiC device fabrication in conventional mature Si fabs.
The Importance of the Gate Driver
By Giovanni Di Maria
Silicon carbide and gallium nitride switching devices?are the components mainly used in all power circuits. Despite their superior results of intrinsic characteristics concerning operating speed, high voltages, currents processed, and low power dissipation, designers pay all their attention to such devices, often forgetting to devote themselves to the related drivers.