Project: Beyond Existing Silicon Carbide Devices aiming at Extreme Severe Temperatures
_x000D_Silicon Carbide (SiC) is now becoming a COstream semiconductor technology for high power electronic devices. Lower switching losses and higher operating temperature make SiC diodes and transistors the technology of choice for future compact, light, efficient and reliable power converters. Typical applications are solar inverters or onboard power converters for EV/HEV, railways or aeronautics._x000D_One of the key advantages of SiC technology is its ability to work up to extreme temperatures, theoretically up to 600 °C. High operating junction temperatures allow reducing drastically the cooling requirements, hence shrinking the size and weight of the heat sink or avoiding fluid cooling. However, today SiC device manufacturers are limiting the junction temperature of their devices to 150 °C or 175 °C. This is done for two reasons. First because some process modules such as the gate oxide, the passivation or the metallization cannot support the high temperature that the intrinsic device can do. The second reason is that the assembly processes, allowing building a power module from SiC bare dice, are not yet mature for operation above 175-200 °C. Therefore a full characterization and qualification at temperatures above 175 °C was never done._x000D_To take advantage of the full benefits of SiC technology, this project targets to build transistors and diodes fully compatible with operation up to 250 °C. Not only device characteristics (blocking voltage, off-state current, on-resistance...) will be optimized for high temperature operation but also special attention will be paid to all the manufacturing and finishing steps (junction doping, passivation, front-side and backside metallization ...) to make sure they can support a reliable operation up to 250 °C. Also, the compatibility of these steps with high temperature assembly processes will be investigated._x000D_At the end of the project, a power converter will be demonstrated to show the benefits of the developed devices in a real application. A "champion application", which will take full advantage of the better performance of the technology, will be defined at the beginning of the project._x000D_The project will also demonstrate an original business model in the field of power devices and SiC technology with the cooperation between a fabless company, CISSOID which is a leader in high temperature semiconductor solutions, and a SiC foundry, Ascatron a spin-off company from Acreo which is a leading research center in the field of SiC technology. Indeed, when the fabless/foundry business model is standard in the semiconductor industry, it is not the case in the field of power devices and even less for SiC components. The BESIDES project will help Ascatron validating his foundry business model, and will allow CISSOID extending his offer with new high power & high voltage transistors and diodes as well as integrated solutions, Intelligent Power Modules (IPM), including CISSOID high temperature gate driver technology and SiC power devices._x000D_The project will also benefit from the results of several regional and European research projects related to the development of high temperature gate drivers (ATAC & FP7 CREAM), to the high temperature packaging of SiC devices (HYPOTHESIS, HIPAC), to thermal modeling (ROMISY) or to on-board power converters (FP7 ACTUATION 2015, BASTOGNE). _x000D__x000D_
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Acronym
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BESIDES
(Reference Number: 7760)
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Duration
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01/01/2013 - 31/12/2015
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Project Topic
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The final goal of the BESIDES project is to establish an affordable processing, assembly and design technology for high-temperature SiC devices that are applicable to a wide range of power levels from a few tens to several thousands of watts and/or extended temperatures up to 250 °C.
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Network
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Eurostars
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Call
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Eurostars Cut-Off 9
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Project partner
