Skip to main content

France pumps $22m into wide-bandgap sector


ST Microelectronics is heading a French national project to develop GaN and SiC Schottky diodes based on 6-inch silicon substrates, and says these compound semiconductors are important for its future power devices.

An 8-way French collaboration has won €15 million ($22 million) in government funding to capitalize on the energy-efficiency promise of wide-bandgap semiconductor devices.

The project, called G2REC, is being run by STMicroelectronics and including contributions from its partners is valued at €30 million in total.

“The program is starting now and it will last four years,” said Christian Nopper, R&D director of the ST division which will manage the project. “We think that in three years we will be able to sample and in four years we will be ready for ramp-up.”

Both GaN and SiC will be embraced by the program, which seeks to make 600 V Schottky diodes on silicon wafers in order to reduce costs and drive acceptance. Consequently Picogiga is contributing its experience of integrating compound semiconductors with silicon, alongside silicon wafer supplier Siltronix.

The cross-discliplinary team will also include the compound foundries of Ommic and the Alcatel-Thales III-V fab, and the SiC polishing expertise of NovaSiC. The smaller partners in the collaboration stand to gain most, Nopper points out.

“Their size today is linked to the niche markets they’re addressing,” he said. “If we succeed in entering the power market with them with wide-bandgap semiconductors, they will increase size in terms of employees.”

Strong demands for power supplies
G2REC's main focus is switch-mode devices for everyday applications, like power supplies for laptops and mobile phones.

For this, GaN-based Schottky diodes are lined up to perform down-conversion from France's 220 V power grid to the much lower voltages at which consumer products operate. Their SiC-based counterparts will target higher power industrial markets.

The French government was keen to draw attention to the potential environmental benefits its investment in G2REC could produce.

“The use of these new materials to manufacture power components will be translated into a notable fall in energy losses,” said the French Agency of Industrial Innovation (AII) in a statement. “G2REC thus contributes to the EU objective to reduce consumption of energy by 20 percent by 2020.”

G2REC stands for “grand gap rectifier”, “grand gap” being the French term for “wide-bandgap”. This is apt for a project concentrating on converting existing French wide-bandgap knowledge into advanced products and a “value chain” feeding their production.

“For ST here in Tours, this program is really part of our cultural portfolio because we have been dealing with power products for 30 years,” Nopper points out. “This is why we pushed this group of wide-bandgap people to focus on the same industrial goals, supported by the state of France.”

“We think that this will be the major trend [in power devices] for the next 5 years,” he said.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sharp enters the non-polar GaN fray

The leading diode laser and consumer electronics manufacturer is hoping to push GaN lasers to longer wavelengths for color display applications. The field of non-polar GaN lasers, currently dominated by Rohm Corporation and the University of California, Santa Barbara, now has another big player in the shape of Sharp Corporation. This firm's researchers, like the other groups, have turned to this material to avoid built-in polarization fields found in conventional c -plane GaN. These fields reduce laser output efficiency and shorten emission wavelengths, in a blue-shift effect that worsens at higher injection currents. Sharp's 400nm blue laser Non-polar m -plane GaN doesn't have these fields, so substrates made of this material are promising candidates for fabricating blue lasers with longer wavelengths, nearer the green part of the spectrum (see related stories). Therefore, rather than the 400 nm laser diodes it makes using c -plane GaN for its Blu-ray pla...
Post a Comment
Read more

Toshiba claims GaN microwave power record

Toshiba claims GaN microwave power record The Japanese conglomerate turns up the power for high-definition satellite broadcasting with its Ku-band GaN-on-SiC HEMT. Toshiba has produced a GaN HEMT with an output power of 65.4 W at 14.5 GHz, that it hopes will replace competing electron-tube technologies in satellite applications. According to the Japanese company, this is the highest power-output FET to operate in the Ku-band, the region of the microwave spectrum between 12 and 18 GHz. Toshiba pushes Ku-Band amps Presented at European Microwave Week on October 8, the device will be sampled at the end of 2007 and should enter mass production in March 2008. The GaN HEMTs are marketed for high-capacity, high-definition satellite broadcasting base stations and high-power radar systems, which both require high-power amplifiers. “Demand is particularly strong for GaN devices, which offer advantages over GaAs devices in heat dissipation and high power performance characteristi...
Post a Comment
Read more

White LEDs offer radio-free wireless option

White LEDs offer radio-free wireless option A photonic alternative to WLAN has been shown to exceed 100 Mbit/s and could provide bandwidth in a currently unlicensed area of the spectrum, if it can conform to general illumination standards. Thanks to white LEDs, overhead lighting could soon be used to transmit data over a RF-free wireless connection. That's according to Joachim Walewski from Siemens Corporate Technology, who has modulated the light emission from white LEDs in order to make a 101 Mbit/s wireless link with a PiN diode photodetector. “With this, you can have interference-free communication,” Walewski pointed out, adding that the visible spectrum is currently free of any requirements for communication licenses. Siemens is currently exploring the technology in order to keep pace with a competing Japanese collaboration that expects to bring similar technology to market by 2011, Walewski says. His Munich-based team claims to be the first to have boosted ...
Post a Comment
Read more