SiC and GaN power semiconductor market to exceed $10 billion in 2027!

Source: Content from "GaN World", thank you.

Expectations are high for continued strong growth in the SiC industry, driven primarily by growth in hybrid and electric vehicle sales. Market penetration is also growing, especially in China, where Schottky diodes, MOSFETs, junction gate field effect transistors (JFETs) and other SiC discrete devices have appeared in mass-produced automotive DC-DC converters and on-board battery chargers.

It is increasingly clear that powertrain main inverters—using SiC MOSFETs instead of Si insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs)—will begin to appear on the market within 3-5 years . Since so many devices are used in main inverters, far more than in DC-DC converters and on-board chargers, this will quickly increase the demand for equipment. Perhaps at some point in time, inverter manufacturers will finally choose to customize full SiC power modules instead of SiC discrete devices. Integration, control and packaging optimization are the main advantages of modular assembly.

Not only will the number of SiC devices per vehicle increase, but new global registrations for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) will also increase tenfold between 2017 and 2027 as many governments around the world target lower air pollution and fewer vehicles that rely on burning fossil fuels. China, India, France, the UK and Norway have all announced plans to ban cars with internal combustion engines and replace them with cleaner vehicles in the coming decades. The outlook for electrified vehicles in general will therefore be very good, and for wide bandgap semiconductors in particular.

The biggest inhibitor to SiC device growth may be GaN devices. The first automotive AEC-Q101-compliant GaN transistor was released by Transphorm in 2017, and GaN devices made on GaN-on-Si epiwafers are significantly lower cost and easier to manufacture than anything on SiC wafers. For these reasons, GaN transistors may become the preferred choice in inverters in the late 2020s, superior to more expensive SiC MOSFETs .

Transphorm's innovative Cascode structure

The most interesting story about GaN power devices in recent years has been the arrival of GaN system integrated circuits (ICs), which are GaN transistors packaged together with silicon gate driver ICs or monolithic all-GaN ICs . Once their performance is optimized for mobile phone and laptop chargers and other high-volume applications, they are likely to become widely available on a wider scale. In contrast, commercial GaN power diode development never really took off because they failed to offer significant benefits over Si devices and development proved too expensive and unfeasible. SiC Schottky diodes are well-positioned for this purpose and have a good pricing roadmap.

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