Views: 0 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2023-08-24 Origin: Site
Tianke Heda
Under the trend of the energy revolution driven by the dual carbon construction, the markets for new energy vehicles, photovoltaic energy storage, and others have shown a significant growth trend. In the green ecological chain, SiC plays an important role and also faces more stringent requirements.
Among them, SiC substrate, as the most valuable, difficult and challenging process, faces significant challenges. In terms of cost, the substrate cost accounts for about 50% of the entire product production. Therefore, the 8-inch substrate has become a "battleground" in the SiC field due to its high effective utilization rate, which helps the industry chain achieve the goal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
In recent years, the 8-inch substrate industry has entered a fast lane of development, and international device factories have important layouts. However, China has launched many supporting policies in the field of SiC, which further promoted the self-reliance of the domestic Semiconductor industry and benefited the SiC industry chain. In this context, about 10 domestic enterprises have made breakthrough progress in the 8-inch substrate field, such as Tianke Heda.
Tianke Heda successfully released an 8-inch substrate to the public in 2022. Currently, all indicators are at the leading level in the industry, and the products have achieved small-scale supply. In terms of industrial layout, Tianke Heda's business has covered the manufacturing of SiC single crystal growth equipment, SiC raw material synthesis, substrate preparation, and epitaxial growth. In the future, with the production of the holding company's investment in the Tianke project, the production line layout of Tianke Heda will also be more complete.
Core charging
With the promotion of global energy-saving and carbon reduction plans, the upgrading of consumer demand, and the acceleration of automotive electrification process, the demand for automotive grade power semiconductors is gradually increasing. The third-generation semiconductor SiC materials have been favored in recent years due to their excellent characteristics such as bandgap, thermal conductivity, saturated electron drift rate, and radiation resistance, as well as good thermal and chemical stability.
The main application scenarios of SiC devices in electric vehicles include OBC, on-board air conditioning, and main drive inverters. Given the small size, lightweight, high efficiency, and high reliability required for on-board applications, OBC applications can better demonstrate the value of SiC.
With the acceleration of electric vehicle architecture towards the 800V voltage platform, traditional silicon based power device solutions are difficult to meet the energy consumption requirements of pure electric vehicles, and the energy consumption of the air conditioning system in electric vehicles is relatively high, second only to power energy consumption. Therefore, SiC MOSFET will become the preferred solution for electric air conditioning compressor controllers; At the same time, the use of SiC MOSFET in the main inverter can help improve the overall efficiency of the 800V platform model by 6-8%.
The SiC products of Xinju Energy have achieved a leading position in the certification progress of electric vehicle customers in China. In 2022, the cumulative number of vehicle level modules has exceeded 10000, and the cumulative delivery has exceeded 50000. In terms of industrial chain collaboration, Xinju Energy has formed a vertical linkage with strategic partners, from substrate materials, wafers and chips, packaging and modules to electric drive controlled charging systems, and its advantages will gradually become prominent.
Wolfspeed
Under the trend of automotive electrification, renewable energy development, and digitization, high-voltage and high-power applications such as new energy vehicles, industry, rail transit, and communication base stations have put forward higher requirements for power semiconductor devices. However, the energy conversion efficiency of traditional silicon based power semiconductor devices has reached the theoretical limit. Therefore, the application potential of third-generation semiconductor materials such as SiC is gradually being explored.
Compared with silicon based power semiconductors, SiC power devices can achieve lower conduction loss and switching loss, and higher conversion efficiency, which is conducive to improving system efficiency, reducing system volume and weight, and saving system costs, such as Solar inverter, server power supply, and automobile Charging station. With the further development of higher voltage applications such as the 800V automotive architecture platform, the demand for higher voltage SiC power devices is gradually increasing. Against this backdrop, 1200V SiC MOSFETs have begun to emerge.
Wolfspeed, as a leading manufacturer of SiC power devices, has launched the third generation SiC MOSFET products, which can provide excellent performance and reliability, fully meet the requirements of numerous applications in industry, energy, automotive, etc., empowering innovation and optimization in the new energy field. At present, its 1200V SiC MOSFET products have expanded the applications of vehicle charger, DC-DC converter, Charging station, fuel cell, Solar inverter, etc., helping to improve the system efficiency and power density. For example, the efficiency of DC-DC converter based on Wolfspeed 1200V SiC MOSFET can be increased to 98.5%.
ShuoKo crystal
SiC has the characteristics of high voltage resistance, high temperature resistance, high frequency, high current, low loss, etc., and has great application potential in electric vehicles, Charging station, photovoltaic energy storage, rail transit, smart grid and other fields.
However, SiC is still in its initial development stage and there are a series of challenges that need to be addressed urgently. Among them, the preparation of SiC single crystals has always been a global technical challenge, such as the need to address various defects in point, line, and plane bodies; The highly stable crystal growth process is the most core technology among them, and the physical vapor transport law is currently a mature and industrialized SiC single crystal growth method that can achieve large-scale production.
In terms of materials, 8-inch substrates have advantages such as higher chip utilization area and lower costs, which will change the market landscape. At present, domestic and foreign manufacturers are actively deploying, and in the future, it is expected to accelerate the process of domestic substitution of raw materials through deep collaborative cooperation between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.
As one of the main forces, Shuoko Crystal has independent research and development production capabilities covering SiC growth equipment manufacturing, high-purity silicon carbide powder preparation process, SiC single crystal substrate preparation and processing process. It has broken through key technologies such as crystal growth, cutting and polishing, and achieved a powder purity of 99.9999%. It has also achieved commercial mass production of high-purity SiC single crystals, and has successfully achieved the development of 8-inch SiC single crystals, overcoming the difficulty of obtaining large-sized seed crystals The problems faced by crystal growth, such as high stress and crystal cracking, have led to small-scale production and sales of products.
AIXTRON
Compound semiconductor technology is leveraging diverse application markets such as power electronics, optoelectronics, and semiconductor displays. In the next few years, the overall market size of compound semiconductors will show an increasing trend year by year. Among them, the performance in the power electronics field is particularly strong, which means that the demand for SiC and GaN will usher in broad and rapid growth, and also means that the demand for large-scale mass production is becoming more urgent.
SiC and GaN are fiercely competing with traditional Si materials, and the production process of new materials needs to meet the process matching with the Si semiconductor industry, which is highly automated and intelligent, in order to meet the cost and yield requirements of end users. In the entire production process, epitaxial wafers are the key link to undertake the substrate and chip. The uniformity and defect density involved in this link are key factors affecting the yield and cost of back-end devices. In other words, epitaxial wafers play an important role in SiC and GaN mass production, and therefore, MOCVD equipment for producing epitaxial wafers is crucial.
AIXTRON Aixtron is the main supplier of MOCVD equipment for SiC/GaN. For SiC epitaxial production, AIXTRON has launched G10-SiC, which can meet both 6-inch and 8-inch SiC epitaxial production requirements. G10-SiC adopts AIXTRON's planetary reaction technology, which reflects the advantages of high production capacity of multi chip machines while controlling the uniformity of the epitaxial film. The production of SiC power devices is putting forward new requirements for automation. G10-SiC has achieved transparent and visible epitaxial processes, including real-time control of substrate surface temperature, reflectivity, and curvature, reaction precursor concentration, and the use of robotic arms to automate substrate replacement and even equipment consumables replacement.
G10-SiC has achieved industry-leading process cavity utilization and single cavity production capacity, helping customers achieve high-quality, high-yield, and cost-effective epitaxial wafers to meet the demand for mass production of power electronics. For GaN epitaxial production, the AIXTRON G5+C device also meets the requirements of 6-inch and 8-inch GaN on Si epitaxial production, equipped with C2C automatic cassette wafer transmission technology and in-situ cleaning technology, suitable for large-scale production of GaN power devices and Micro LED products.
