­The Quickest Way to GaN and SiC Designs

With the price of energy remaining high, more buyers in both the consumer and industrial space are worried about their use of electricity. They are also looking for more compact solutions. This has given manufacturers the incentive to try make their products as efficient and small as possible to satisfy those customer desires.

The introduction of wide-bandgap materials in the form of SiC and GaN devices have helped designs with both of those needs. However, those components are more difficult to design into products that their silicon counterparts, both in the control of the components and in the layout of the PCB. That is not so much of a problem for larger companies with more resources, but smaller companies can often be struggle to meet deadlines, and are left with the difficult decision between delaying the launch of a product and missing out on a good part of its profit window, or to sticking with silicon, and posting worse efficiency figures than their larger rivals. One way that those companies stand a better chance of meeting product launch dates while including the latest technologies, is by enlisting the assistance of their distributor.

Thomas Hauer is Technology Specialist Manager for Power in the EMEA region at Avnet Silica, and he took some time out to talk to PSD about the company’s initiatives to assist European customers to get GaN and SiC designs to market. Hauer’s team is pretty small, with himself, two engineers in Germany, two in Italy, one in France and one in the UK. However, they have plenty of expertise in all of the areas that are required to complete a design, such as power design, PCB-level design, tackling EMC and reliability engineering, as well as semiconductor manufacturing and design. That varied experience allows the team to pool knowledge to assist customers throughout the complete design cycle.

The job is reliant on comprehending how the customer conceives the complete final product. Hauer explains by saying, “We have to understand what the customer really requires. We get the specifications from the customer, not only electrically, but also mechanically and then find out their ultimate design goals. It may be that one customer designing a vehicle charger may have the priority of eliminating active cooling, so needs the highest efficiency, or another may want the design to be as compact as possible. Then we can make suggestions on how they can improve the design to meet that aim. For that to happen, we need to understand the reason the customer wants to move to wide-bandgap components”.

The team’s work is varied and can run from advisory work to full designs. Hauer elaborates, “It depends on the company and how we allowed to help. Some companies bring us in to consult without giving us a lot of information on the design, as they may have security work or are just quite secretive. Others have handed us the key to the lab, and say please fix our PCB and leave us to it. The others are somewhere between those extremes. Most customers are really eager to learn from our experience for their future designs because we have been involved in many different products, so we try make as much of our solutions as open source as possible to assist them as much as we are can”.

As for specific examples, Hauer points out to one that is close to his own heart as a motocross enthusiast. Flux Performance designs electric motocross bikes, one of which was displayed on the Avnet Silica stand at the recent PCIM exhibition. Most of Europe’s motocross and enduro tracks are located close to urban areas, and in danger of closing because of noise and environmental damage. Electric motocross bikes offer a solution to both of these problems. However, Flux Performance is a small start-up that doesn’t have many resources available internally to complete its design, so has turned to Avnet Silica for assistance.

The CEO of Flux is a former super motor cross rider, so he has the knowledge of how the bike should perform. He is also a mechanical engineer, so he knows all about how balanced the bike needs to be etc., but when it comes to the electronics, there is only a single engineer who has to design the whole system, including the inverter and BMS. He reaches out quite frequently to see if his ideas make sense and for more detailed assistance. We have helped extensively with both the electronic design and thermal management.”

Asked about how he sees the overall European market, Hauer thinks silicon carbide will be more widely adopted in the region because of our strong industrial base and the fact that GaN has been mainly used so far in consumer designs, such as phone chargers, where the industry is mainly based in Asia. The silicon MOSFET and IGBT market will likely remain the main competition to SiC adoption. He guesses that the IGBT and silicon MOSSFET market will continue to grow at a rate of between 4 and 6%, while the SiC market will see annual growth around 25%. Although manufacturers have invested in extra capacity, he doesn’t see a steep drop in SiC price in the near term because of the large capital expenditure made in these plants and the process required to manufacture SiC devices.

Huaer finishes by saying, “Firstly, manufacturers have to recoup their investments, and secondly is SiC manufacture is a very power hungry technology. With silicon you have three states - solid, liquid and gas. However, silicon carbide misses the liquid state, so it is either solid or gas. And that complicates things as it requires a lot of heating. After that a relatively large amount of time is required for the wafer to settle. Until there is an innovation that makes that process faster and more reliable, I don't see prices coming down by a significant margin”.

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