China Silicon Carbide Semiconductor Manufacturers, Suppliers, Factory

Epitaxial wafer process is a critical technique used in semiconductor manufacturing. It involves the growth of a thin layer of crystal material on top of a substrate, which has the same crystal structure and orientation as the substrate. This process creates a high-quality interface between the two materials, allowing for the development of advanced electronic devices.

Etching Process: Silicon vs. Silicon Carbide

Within the silicon carbide (SiC) industry chain, substrate suppliers hold significant leverage, primarily due to value distribution. SiC substrates account for 47% of the total value, followed by epitaxial layers at 23%, while device design and manufacturing constitute the remaining 30%. This inverted value chain stems from the high technological barriers inherent to substrate and epitaxial layer production. Three major challenges plague SiC substrate growth: stringent growth conditions, slow growth rates, and demanding crystallographic requirements. These complexities contribute to increased processing difficulty, ultimately resulting in low product yields and high costs. Furthermore, the epitaxial layer’s thickness and doping concentration are critical parameters directly impacting the final device performance.

The application areas of SiC-based and Si-based GaN are not strictly separated. In GaN-On-SiC devices, the cost of SiC substrate is relatively high, and with the growing maturity of SiC long crystal technology, the cost of the device is expected to fall further, and it is used in power devices in the field of power electronics.

SiC substrate can have microscopic defects, such as Threading Screw Dislocation (TSD), Threading Edge Dislocation (TED), Base Plane Dislocation (BPD), and others. These defects are caused by deviations in the arrangement of atoms at the atomic level. SiC crystals may also have macroscopic dislocations, like Si or C inclusions, micropipe, hexagonal voids, polymorphs, etc. These dislocations are typically large in size.

SiC MOSFETs are transistors that offer high power density, improved efficiency, and low failure rates at high temperatures. These advantages of SiC MOSFETs bring numerous benefits to electric vehicles (EVs), including longer driving range, faster charging, and potentially lower cost battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Over the past five years, SiC MOSFETs have been widely used in the power electronics of EVs in vehicles from OEMs such as Tesla and Hyundai. In fact, SiC inverters accounted for 28% of the BEV market in 2023.