GaN-over-Si: The Promising Technology for Power Electronics in Automotive

The automotive industry is preparing to go through a revolution with the corning emission standard requirements, bringing rise to further advancements in vehicle electrification, from stop-and-start to battery-powered electric vehicles. According to Strategy Analytics, the latest market analysis predictions indicate booming demand for power functions with forecasted automotive power component revenues in excess of $1.5B by 2018. In the last decade, the semiconductor industry has significantly improved the silicon-based components with many generations of medium voltage IGBT and fast diodes. However, one recognizes that these components have reached a performance plateau and new expectations have been raised with other semiconductor materials, such as Si-C, bulk GaN and GaN-over-Si. The global technical communities have known that GaN will be a strong challenger to silicon for RF and power components. However, the costs and the metallurgy of GaN substrates used in the development of new RF and power technologies thwarted attempts at commercialization at acceptable prices. Recent developments of new epitaxy techniques have allowed for an increase in the supply of GaN hetero-substrates. As a result of customer system requirements and technology evolution, a few years ago Freescale made the decision to start developments first in the RF domain and then in high power technology. In this lecture, we will present: The automotive power market outlook for EViHEV; Freescale latest R+D results on GaN/Si; Expected component performances; Associated system benefits.