Bosch gives go-ahead for volume production of silicon carbide chips

https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/longer-range-as-standard-bosch-gives-go-ahead-for-volume-production-of-silicon-carbide-chips-235722.html

by Tomte • 5 years ago

249 240 5 years ago

bosch-presse.de

jackhodkinson• 5 years ago

This is a good article on the background https://hackaday.com/2019/11/25/new-silicon-carbide-semicond...

moontear• 5 years ago

The longform articles on hackaday are always very informative

GhettoComputers• 5 years ago

This is fascinating! I only know of silicon carbide as thc heating cups that are easy to clean, didn’t think of them as computer semiconductors!

lnenad• 5 years ago

What do you think is that magic range figure that we need to achieve, which will stop all of these range related news from being a daily thing?

Imho it's 600+ miles on a single charge, with a 300m recharge in 10 minutes.

throwaway81523• 5 years ago

Maybe it's less about range than having charging available everywhere.

moffkalast• 5 years ago

Well the range is shorter, towing anything reduces range further, charging is slow, few gas stations support electric, the initial car price is higher and I'm sure there are other arguments as well.

_ph_2• 5 years ago

I do think that the required range is much less, especially with fast recharge. What is required is to have more people actually drive electric cars and of course make sure, that there are enough recharging spots.

pmontra• 5 years ago

And trasform into electricity all the energy that we deliver as gasoline and diesel now.

That could come from burning oil (probably new power plants) or from solar or whatever (new infrastructure anyway.)

sveme2• 5 years ago

For me personally, it is 500km range under bad conditions, i.e., 120km/h speed and in winter. Alternatively 300km range added in about 15mins. Make such a stop after three hours anyway.

speedgoose7• 5 years ago

You forgot to say that you need to pull a boat on a trailer and that you go uphill both ways. As they say, if an electric car can't do that, then they are not viable to anyone.

josephcsible• 5 years ago

Alternatively 300km range added in about 15mins.

Doesn't that already exist in cars that consumers already have? Can't the Lucid Air, Porsche Taycan, and all of the new Teslas (and probably more I'm not thinking of) all do that?

jeffrallen• 5 years ago

The petrolhead press will never stop criticizing electric cars until their range is 10 times that of a comparable weight of gasoline, and then they will choose some new strawman to battle, like cobalt or grid capacity or whatever. These guys are not interested in a fair conversation.

I wish that government electric car subsidies would be retargeted at cheap cars. I want to drive an electric economy car, not a luxury car. Here in Switzerland, we kind of have that: subsidies are in the form of a 99% reduction in road tax, so that every year you get a subsidy, flashy car or boring car. I'd like to see the kind of people who have to flash their cash (ahem, Tesla buyers) pay for moderate income car owner's road taxes.

Scoundreller• 5 years ago

With opex being so much lower for electric, I’ll believe they pay for themselves when corporate fleets become all electric on new fleet additions (e.g. delivery drivers/taxis).

Right now; they seem to be going for hybrids.

If they can’t make the economic case for electric, I don’t know how anyone that drives 1/5th or 1-10th as much can.

ekianjo2• 5 years ago

The cheapest car is the one you never change or replace. Subsidizing buying new cars is not environment friendly at all, its just consumerism.

clouddrover9• 5 years ago

The petrolhead press will never stop criticizing electric cars

No. The petrolhead press praises today's EVs for what they're strong at (acceleration) and correctly criticizes them for what they're (generally) weak at (price, range, charge time). When EV's come along with strong range like the Mercedes EQS and the Lucid Air they are rightly praised for their range.

and then they will choose some new strawman to battle

No. This is just a strawman of your own.

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

I think general familiarity is a bigger factor.

The news won't stop when some technical or economic barrier is passed (which I'd argue has already happened) but when people generally believe it to be true.

But the news won't stop, because battery, motor, charging innovations now have an even bigger market and even more people will be working on it. They'll just change from "this is the breakthrough that makes EV practical" to "this innovation will make your already more than adequate EV even better and cheaper in a relentless progress of technology".

kwhitefoot5• 5 years ago

Range is no longer an issue for electric cars in most of Europe. Here in Norway 70% of new cars sold in November were battery electric with the Tesla Model Y being the winner. For the year as a whole more than 60% of cars sold are electric and the Model Y is the winner. Also sold are lots of Citroen, Renault, VW, Audi, Jaguar, and a substantial number of Porsche and some Toyotas.

My 2015 Model S 70D has a range of 330 km in summer a little less in the winter. I use a supercharger to add perhaps 40% charge about once a week, the rest of the time I charge overnight.

Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

14.8% of private cars in Norway are electric now, more than 25% if you include hybrids.

The only thing holding most people back from buying electric is the cost and that is why we have so many in Norway, at the moment they are exempt from the purchase taxes and annual fees that ICE cars must pay.

speedgoose7• 5 years ago

I think we started to pay some of the annual fees last year. Your insurance probably increased a little bit because of that.

underscore_ku• 5 years ago

74% :P https://electrek.co/2021/12/03/norway-again-shows-all-electr...

throwawayay02• 5 years ago

But how can people living in cities charge their cars overnight? Does each private garage spot have it's own electricity meter?

zemvpferreira5• 5 years ago

As a fellow European you are grossly overstating the convenience of electrics based on a very special experience of living in Norway.

Western Europe (where I live) relies on street parking and has very little capacity for overnight charging. I regularly see people camping out for chargers in mall parking lots. I can't imagine the situation is much different in urban Romania, Poland or Lithuania.

I wish we had a charging grid that allowed for most private cars to be electric without any range anxiety, but that's just not true right now. You might also wish for street parking to go away (I do) but that's not happening either.

peoplefromibiza5• 5 years ago

friendly reminder: Norway represents Europe same way Alaska is representative of USA.

dmitriid10• 5 years ago

Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

Yes, hardly anyone needs 600 miles, but if you can't find a place to charge overnight, boom, you wake up to 80 kilometers left in your charge, and you need to find a fast charger somewhere in the vicinity, and high chances are, it wil be occupied by other cars.

You grossly overestimate availability of chargers in Europe (or anywhere, for that matter)

cosmodisk• 5 years ago

What's the infrastructure like in Norway for the car owners who live in flats? As others commented, it's not the range that is an issue( I could cross my entire country with one charge in most EVs) but rather the charging infrastructure. Also the purchasing power in more than half of Europe makes EVs prohibitively expensive.

aakour• 5 years ago

To counter all the whataboutism in the replies to your comment, I just wanted to say that I live in a flat in central Berlin and park on the street, and charging or range have never been actual issues. My car use consists of trips around Berlin and Germany, driving to rural Finland and back, regularly towing a trailer, etc.

thendrill• 5 years ago

I bet you live in Southern Norway.

Good luck driving electric in the North.

Also. Electric cars are slow.... Good luck holding 120 kph with an electric and not watch the battery melt.

ZeljkoS• 5 years ago

I beg to disagree. South Europe is not like Norway: https://svedic.org/tech/daddy-did-you-really-need-electric-c...

lodovic• 5 years ago

Hardly anyone needs 600 miles and no one seems concerned that it takes an hour to add 300 km because most people charge overnight.

I could do with a 200km range for my daily commute, but I also have a camping trailer that I'd like to use at least once every year for a 1000km+ trip. This is just not feasible with the current generation of EVs. I could imagine loading up the camping trailer with batteries to give me that 1000+ km range, though that will increase the weight and recharging at the destination is usually impossible.

ppg677• 5 years ago

Doesn't it get cold in Norway? I live in the Upper Midwest of the U.S. In our colder months, the range of a Tesla can drop in nearly half.

macinjosh• 5 years ago

In America 600 miles is a short road trip.

fallingknife2• 5 years ago

Range is solved. The issue now is charger density. In some more remote places you may have to go 50 miles to find a charger. Same thing was probably an issue for gas cars a long time ago and it solved itself when gas stations became profitable everywhere.

ec1096856• 5 years ago

You can’t fill up a ICE car at home, so the density will be less as a result.

I know people all can’t charge at home and street parking is a thing, so it seems like 400+ mile range and 10 minute fill ups 10 minute away will be needed.

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

this will vary a lot by region. some places are more densely populated than others. looking up regional statistics of average trip length and percentiles (like the length of 95% of trips) could give some objective metrics to complement what might be primarily psychological / behavioral hangups

I think what would really clinch this is not creating gargantuan batteries but simply making batteries universal plug-n-play. So if needed you just stop a battery station and replace it.

This solves also the unfortunate bottleneck of everybody charging their batteries during night-time, which (last time I checked) is when the sun is not shinning...

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

There are not enough range anxious people to continue to keep ICE manufacturers going. It's more a question of when production stops rather than if. There are a few holdouts of course that might last until they actually get banned on most roads. But for most manufacturers that is going to be a lot sooner than they are hoping right now.

That will no doubt upset some ICE vehicle owners with enough disposable income that they could feasibly be targeted with a lucrative product that appeals to them. Good news is that cars with 600 miles and 10 minute recharge to 300 mile (50%) are totally feasible!

E.g. the hummer that GM is rumored to be working on will apparently have 200kwh. Of course it has the weight of a Tank and the aerodynamics of barn door, so it might not be enough to get to 600 miles.

If Tesla ever puts that kind of battery in a Tesla it would probably end up with close to 1000 mile range and they would need to make it a bit bigger. That's 20 hours non stop driving at 50 miles an hour. Absolutely nobody should be doing that. But you could build a car that does that. That's a about 3x what they currently put in a model 3 (75kwh). It will be a bit heavier of course so maybe not 3x the range. But you get my point. Solvable problem for people with money.

For the rest of us normal people, take a break & plug in, go to the bathroom, eat some lunch, stretch your legs, relax, etc. After the 300+ miles that you can get with a few decent EVs that's probably a good idea. It's not the end of the world.

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

I assume there are plenty of poorer people in nations with poorer electric infrastructure to keep ICE manufacturing going for a long time. At least a couple decades.

The more fossil fuel consumption drops in developed countries, the cheaper fossil fuels get, which would then allow people who currently cannot afford fossil fuels to buy them and replace demand.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

There are not enough range anxious people to continue to keep ICE manufacturers going.

True in some smaller countries, but in places like the United States it’s very common for people to do a road trip occasionally to visit family or go on vacation.

Stopping for a 30-60 minute charge a couple times per trip isn’t terrible, but it would mean that my annual family visit would become a 2-day drive instead of a 1-day drive. I can deal with that, but many people aren’t ready for it.

I doubt we’ll see gigantic batteries going into small cars for ridiculous range. The efficiency hit would be too large due to the extra weight. I think fast charging and a fast charging network is what we need.

But charging networks are the real issue at this point. They’re out there, but interoperability issues means the various networks often don’t work as fast as they claim or maybe not at all with your car. Range anxiety is bad enough, but when you can’t even be sure the charging station will work when you get there it’s a different level of worry altogether.

dreamcompiler5• 5 years ago

In the US I've driven several cross country trips (multi-thousand miles) in a Tesla with 300 miles of range. It's not only not a big deal; it's the most comfortable touring car I've ever owned.

If you stick to interstates, recharging at superchargers is easy. If you travel on smaller roads you have to plan more carefully to find destination chargers, RV parks, etc along the way but so far that hasn't been a problem for me.

Granted I recharge in my garage so I can commute locally without ever needing to think about range, but for purposes of long-distance driving I think range anxiety is an overblown issue, at least for Teslas in the US.

maxerickson• 5 years ago

Looking at the trip I took over Thanksgiving, there are 3 Superchargers on the route, 2 of which I would pretty much have to stop at. The 3rd one is more than 300 miles from the start, and the second one is more than 200 miles from the destination. So 2 stops, 10-15 minutes each. One stop is several miles from the freeway on a busy town road, which isn't bad, but another 10-15 minutes. The other stop is very close to the freeway, so pretty much just charge time.

The largest gaps between gas stations on that trip are probably 20 or 30 miles.

I would describe the Supercharging trip as very doable, but it requires following ~1 available plan vs just stopping when it is convenient (for a bathroom break or snack or whatever).

xorcist2• 5 years ago

That's 1000 km. Which is much farther than any gasoline powered car with a full tank.

Range anxiety will stop being a thing when electric vehicles are common and nobody thinks of them a something special. It's a matter of social acceptance, and the infrastructure that follows.

ec1096856• 5 years ago

You can always find a gas station that will get you going within 10 minutes, so it’s a different consideration when charging is hard.

Driving an EV would be terribly annoying if I didn’t have a charger at home, but I know people that rely on super charging to keep their car going (have free super charging given early Tesla adopter).

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

Depends, if you don’t toad trip much in a huge geography like the usa or australia, and have a house, range is already solved.

phkahler• 5 years ago

In city driving somewhere from 200 to 300 miles will be enough. For long trips, charge time is important and can be reduced by using higher voltage batteries. 10 minutes is still out of reach.

ec1096856• 5 years ago

We did 400 miles / hour at super charger just recently on a 2018 car, so 100km in 10 mins. Yes, not there, but getting closer. 2x better than where it was a few years ago.

ksec• 5 years ago

Imho it's 600+ miles on a single charge, with a 300m recharge in 10 minutes.

In my opinion the Battery equation is already solved. Even for those who are at the end of longer driving range curve, we have a solid and realistic roadmap of battery technology. Pick Tesla tabless battery for example. It isn't Solid Battery like Holy Grail Battery, but it gets to the point where even if you are somewhat skeptical of EV, surely this is edging close to good enough?

People often confuse range anxiety with battery capacity. I dont think that is strictly true. It is one of these things where engineers would come in and suggest we need bigger battery to solve our customer's problem. But here is an product person POV, what if you have fast charging station everywhere. From your car pack living in cities, to packing in a mall or pubic parking space. This is similar to charging smartphones. Once you can charge your smartphone even dinning in Restaurants or on a Bus. You dont get nervous about running out of battery.

So as many comment have suggested, the biggest obstacle to EV isn't battery, is the abundance of Charging station. And given I actually believe City transport in the future should be micro mobility, whether that is e-bike or something else we have yet imagined, we need charging port for both bike and EV. And this needs some government planning.

While this is all good discussion, I really wish we focus more on silicon carbide :)

I wonder why they didn't jump straight to 300mm and only upgraded to 200mm wafers. They could have completely cornered the market with better economy of scale.

sixothree• 5 years ago

Serious answer I've heard many times. For anyone on the coast from Texas to Florida, it means being able to evacuate a hurricane. This means the possibility of sitting in traffic for 12 hours to travel 300 miles.

ec1096856• 5 years ago

Good point. It is comforting to have access to a backup ICE car.

The other thing you can get burned with is to forget to charge before a trip. If so, it’s about an hour detour to drive to super charger, wait and get back.

pornel• 5 years ago

I don't think it needs any new inventions, only wider rollout of what we can do already: fast DC chargers.

Current EVs need a 20 min charge per 3 hours of driving. It may not be ideal for pee-in-a-bottle cannonball racers, but IMHO it's entirely reasonable for most people. It's approaching a point of diminishing returns.

Compare this with charging of smartphones vs brick phones. Daily charging used to be considered a dealbreaker, but fast charging made it a no-big-deal, and people got used to it.

alkonaut• 5 years ago

Depends on the available charging infrastructure. If you can go 6-7 hours without passing a fast charger and it’s -20C outside then you need the equivalent of a 60L diesel tank (1000km range) to manage.

pjc502• 5 years ago

I wonder not so much about retail customers as commercial ones. The Hertz-Tesla deal is spectacular, but what about all those dirty diesel Transit vans? Container trucks? The latter in particular need to manage the 8-10h maximum legal shift of a driver with a full load.

elric• 5 years ago

Can someone elaborate on why this seems to be limited to electric vehicles? Or is that merely where Bosch's focus lies?

formerly_proven4• 5 years ago

EVs contain the by far highest power consumer electronics and are set to become a commodity. Though non-Si power devices aren't limited to EVs, some phone chargers use GaN FETs. In industrial stuff SiC switches are used in some VFDs as well.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I wonder if this will hit power tools too. They have high watt needs and SiC might play here.

ganzuul• 5 years ago

Category of power electronics and https://www.ipcei-me.eu/partners-power-semiconductors/

Stopping short of looking up EU grant numbers, the wording seem to be meant to address a target audience and not meant to educate the public.

dhruvrrp• 5 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding from the article how do these chips help with faster charging/longer range? Saw the hackaday article but that doesn't really explain it either

_ph_2• 5 years ago

The idea is, to minimize losses in the power electronics. That should give a bit of range increase (but not too much) but mostly It reduces the heat produced while operating. So they can be smaller, need less cooling. Being smaller helps with production costs, as wafer space is the main cost driver.

raverbashing• 5 years ago

You can work with higher voltages, at higher frequencies (also faster switching speeds). All this mean lower losses (= higher efficiency)

BostonEnginerd• 5 years ago

Because silicon carbide has a wide band gap, you can use it to switch higher voltages. This means lower current losses through wiring.

It also can operate at higher temperatures more effectively, so it can be driven harder than a silicon transistor.

zbrozek• 5 years ago

It's a pretty incremental and small opportunity, but one worth seizing nonetheless. SiC devices have a better figure of merit (Qg * Rds) at high voltages than Si devices. The lower gate charge (Qg) means you can switch them more quickly, spending less time transitioning between fully-on and fully-off (where the device is inefficient). And the lower drain-to-source resistance (Rds) means that when fully-on it's generating less heat as well.

In a motor controller you will probably bank that as an efficiency improvement, probably on the order of 1-2% at cruise and maybe a bit more during heavy acceleration or deceleration. In a charger you will probably change your optimization to reduce its size and weight for a given power delivery capability. In case that's on onboard charger, that means you haul around less weight and further improve vehicle efficiency a bit. That improved figure of merit also reduces the cost of having more power handling capability, which is how it might incrementally speed up charging.

To my mind, the biggest thing we can do to improve cars generally is to figure out how to reduce their weight. It's not obvious how to do that without either cutting back on passive safety or dramatically driving up the structural cost (e.g., with metallic foams for energy absorption in crashes).

ec1096856• 5 years ago

With Tesla Super Chargers, it delivers DC to the car, so the onboard charger is bypassed, so it doesn’t do much for saving space there.

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

Not An EE, But(tm): A lot of engineering in electric vehicles is in managing the heat in the high voltage electronics. These transistors could be used in the traction inverter and the charging systems to get better efficiency and higher heat tolerance.

If you open up an electric motor controller you'll find it's full of MOSFETs, and they get really hot the harder you push them. The ones in EVs usually have liquid cooling and/or fans and lots of heat sinks.

So with this chemistry it sounds like less energy spent cooling, and more energy spent driving or charging.

Also sounds like they're more efficient at higher voltages in general. So again, more range or more power, or both.

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

Nothing about actual numbers like transistor density, gate width etc. Just bragging about having a larger wafer which is a useless metric without density if the number of transistors per wafer is lesser.

laserbeam• 5 years ago

Isn't wafer size the production/cost bottleneck? In my understanding these chips are meant for higher energy/power management, not necessarily fast compute. I get what you want would be interesting, but I also find them less relevant in an article about production.

kragen• 5 years ago

Although it's ambiguous, I don't think they're talking about making integrated circuits, but about making discrete power transistors. Usually we say "chip" for "integrated circuit" but transistors and diodes are chips too.

formerly_proven4• 5 years ago

This is about power electronics. Density is 1-2 transistors per package.

view• 5 years ago

Not related to semiconductors but I've recently bought a ring with a lab made silicon carbide moissanite crystal.

They're incredibly beautiful and I think a good alternative to diamonds:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite

thomasmg• 5 years ago

I bought one for my wife's wedding ring as well. The local jeweller (who made the rings) tested it with his diamond tester device -- and the led light said 'diamond'. He was a bit surprised :-)

trulyme3• 5 years ago

Wikipedia agrees... :)

As some of its properties are quite similar to diamond, moissanite can be used for scams. Testing equipment based on measuring thermal conductivity in particular may give deceiving results.

iwwr• 5 years ago

These chips, at least in IC form, could enable the long-term exploration of Venus from the surface. This is because SiC can work at 400C or higher temperatures.

freemint• 5 years ago

Normally i would suspect that mixed solid is more sensitive to heat (lower melting point) then a pure material. Why isn't this the case for SiC?

aeleos• 5 years ago

There are many cases where mixed solid materials are stronger than the sum of their parts. Heat tolerance is all about high bond strength between the materials, and strategic mixing of materials can enhance that property or others

kortex2• 5 years ago

Been a while since I was in the chemistry game, but my guess is lattice structure and packing. Pure Si has relatively long bonds compared to carbon, so the intermolecular forces are a bit weaker. Apparently SiC has over 250 polymorphs, but the most common is the alpha.

... ok I'm reading about the material properties of SiC and it's insanely complex so I'm just going handwave and say that α-SiC has tighter packing with stronger bonds because of the alternating Si and C atoms.

formerly_proven4• 5 years ago

Chips aren't a single piece of Si or SiC crystal, but a superbly complicated arrangement of doped regions, insulating, metal and plating layers, so the melting point of the base crystal doesn't matter here (Si melts at ~1500 °C, C depends, and SiC seems to sublime at very high temperatures like carbon, instead of melting - corrections welcome). The limit to sustained high-temperature operation of ICs is due to all of these things starting to diffuse around and getting into places they're not supposed to be.

pjc502• 5 years ago

Crystals are conceptually very different from "mixed solids". Eutectics, e.g. solder, count as mixed solids.

marcosdumay• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that SiC is a substance, so a pure SiC crystal is not a mixed solid.

Mixed solids are more sensitive to temperature variations (there's no change on the melting point), but actual chips are already full of mixed materials, and temperature variation isn't the bottleneck. A SiC chip has actually a bit fewer kinds of materials on the mix, but still, probably not enough to make a difference. (Anyway, we are talking about discrete transistors here, so the material count is exactly the same.)

You are probably thinking about pure substance (the ones that only have a single kind of chemical element). If so, you are completely wrong, pure substances usually have a very low melting point, and very few reach as high temperatures as you can get with composed ones.

simonbarker872• 5 years ago

SiC is a wide band gap semi conductor so it takes a much higher temperature for the intrinsic carrier concentration to rise to the point where it is no longer a semi conductor and just a conductor - it was 12 years ago since I finished my PhD in SiC and related devices so I can’t explain in much more detail but that’s the crux of it

jl27183• 5 years ago

It does have a lower melting point than diamond. The bond strength is determined by the electro-negativity of the bond pair. In this case, it is between silicon and carbon.

kitten_mittens_• 5 years ago

Wikipedia has the surface temperature of Venus at 464C, would SiC be able to handle that?

dogma11382• 5 years ago

Directly probably not but the higher the working temperature of your electronics is the easier it would be to cool it to a working temperature.

__MatrixMan__• 5 years ago

That's awesome, although I was kind of excited to see how far we can get with clockwork.

Zenst• 5 years ago

Not just Venus, the whole cost of cooling chips and cost of raw material extra's like heat-sinks could be reduced and that in itself would make a huge saving thru volume. Some IC'c on this type of silicon wouldn't need that extra cooling cost and that is were the big saving will come in, even with the extra cost of the IC's factored in.

That and if you can remove all cooling, not just cost savings, but in some cases being able to remove active cooling and less moving parts is always an engineering win win.

mikepurvis2• 5 years ago

Unless you're changing the underlying currents or resistances, you'll still have heat losses that need to go somewhere.

I don't think it's that a 700C chip doesn't need cooling the way a 90C chip does; it's that the delta between 700C and room temperature means that a much smaller and much more passive cooling apparatus may be sufficient.

ridgeguy2• 5 years ago

I think SiC devices will be a way station on the road to diamond devices for extreme environments. GaN devices will be the next after SiC, then on to diamond.

I've seen a diamond FET operating at 700°C. Devices like that could use the Venusian atmosphere for cooling.

jl27183• 5 years ago

GaN is only really good for applications requiring direct bandgaps like LEDs and extremely high electron mobility like plasma micro-antennas. I believe that SiC will eventually replace the photonic applications with direct-band gap strains and dopants, but not the high-mobility applications.

vba• 5 years ago

Outside of the car, will this allow residential EVSEs (the ‘charger’ on the side of your house/garage) to become a lot smaller?

formerly_proven4• 5 years ago

There's no power conversion in an EVSE, it's just an RCD and a contactor.

dreamcompiler5• 5 years ago

Why do they need to be smaller? The Tesla EVSE is about the size of a loaf of bread. And I doubt it needs SiC because it's just a smart relay for 240v anyway; it's not switching power at high frequencies or getting hot.

rusanu• 5 years ago

A quick intro into EVSE and why there is no power 'charger' in them, and the space they take is just empty air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMxB7zA-e4Y

unraveller• 5 years ago

TL;DW the equipment is empty as it is just like a fancy light switch, an ardiuno hack could replace it, it's all the car's job to negotiate the power it needs. The cost is in the installation.

viernullvier• 5 years ago

As others said, conventional EVSEs are just spiced-up power switches, so there's not much to gain from SiC. It does however open up a pathway to smaller / cheaper / more efficient residential DC fast chargers which can also enable a widespread rollout of V2G.

DeathArrow• 5 years ago

What kind of semiconductors are being made using silicon carbide?

And what is the process node being used?

Will silicon carbide be useful for general computing appliances, CPUs, GPUs?

detaro• 5 years ago

It's more relevant for power applications than computing. Motor drivers, charge controllers, voltage converters, or the switching parts driven by such, that kind of thing.

simonbarker872• 5 years ago

Unlikely, it’s a wide band gap semiconductor so has very different end applications that it’s suitable for and would never compete with silicon, unless you want a radiation/heat hardened device - the processing would be very costly though and getting good wafers is challenging

newaccount74• 5 years ago

it takes several months for a single wafer to pass through several hundred process steps

I knew that semiconductor manufacturing was complex, but this fact surprised me.

nayuki• 5 years ago

How does silicon carbide compare to gallium nitride, another semiconductor that features high frequencies and low losses?

amirhirsch• 5 years ago

GaN has higher electron mobility but SiC has higher thermal conductivity.

So GaN is more efficient for higher frequencies and higher power and SiC is better for high temperatures and has higher potential power density than GaN

SiC will be cheaper and probably dominate GaN in production volume. Epitaxial GaN on SiC (and even GaN on diamond substrate) are used for high power, low noise at high frequency RF where the applications can justify the cost.

ridgeguy2• 5 years ago

There are RF power devices that consist of GaN structures built on a CVD diamond substrate.

Diamond's thermal conductivity is uniquely high. The diamond substrate conducts heat away from the GaN FETs.

RFHIC uses this technology in some of its high power microwave sources and amplifiers.

baybal25• 5 years ago

GaN is way worse for higher power levels, thus absence of it in high power power electronics.

I haven't seen GaN transistor lower than 100mOhms, SiC is easily there.

jl27183• 5 years ago

Order of magnitude cheaper, not as efficient for photonics, can be integrated with Si through epitaxy.

roamerz• 5 years ago

I saw the title and at first thought there was something new in the world of cutting technology - something on the order of a self lubricating metal cutting bit.

pfdietz• 5 years ago

One application for bulk (not IC grade) silicon carbide would be high temperature storage of energy. Use SiC bricks as resistive heating elements and heat an insulated pile to 1800 C. Any industry that uses high temperature heat could heat the bricks during times when electricity is cheap, and draw the heat out later by passing air (or some other fluid) through the bricks.

Bosch gives go-ahead for volume production of silicon carbide chips

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