“PRESiCE will allow more companies to get into the SiC market because they won't have to develop their own design and manufacturing process –an expensive, time-consuming engineering effort,” said Professor Jay Baliga.
In general, companies have developed proprietary SiC manufacturing processes, which has limited the participation of other companies and kept the cost of SiC devices high.
The PRESiCE team worked with X-Fab to implement the manufacturing process and have now shown that it has the high yield and tight statistical distribution of electrical properties for SiC power devices.
Using PRESiCE, the team was successful in making 1.2kV power devices at X-Fab and monolithically integrated a JBS fly-back rectifier into the power MOSFET structure to create a power JBSFET, said to allow a 40% reduction in chip area and halving the package count.
While SiC devices are believed to cost about five times more than silicon power devices, Prof Baliga says the goal is to get that down to 1.5 times the cost. “Hopefully, that will begin the ‘virtuous cycle’: lower cost will lead to higher use; higher use leads to greater production volume; greater production volume further reduces cost, and so on. And consumers are getting a better, more energy-efficient product.”
According to the researchers, the PRESiCE process and chip design process has already been licensed to one company and the team is in talks with several others.