Sanan IC announces commercial release of 6” SiC wafer foundry process

Sanan Integrated Circuit Co Ltd (Sanan IC) of Xiamen City, Fujian province (China’s first 6-inch pure-play compound semiconductor wafer foundry) has added to its foundry services portfolio after achieving full process qualification for the commercial release of 6-inch silicon carbide (SiC) technology, which has emerged as the most mature wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductor for power electronics circuit designs.

Founded in 2014 as a subsidiary of Sanan Optoelectronics Co Ltd (China’s largest LED epiwafer and chip maker, based on GaN and GaAs technologies), the firm now provides dedicated capacity for its 6-inch SiC wafer processing services in addition to its III-V gallium arsenide (GaAs), gallium nitride (GaN) and indium phosphide (InP) compound semiconductor manufacturing.

“We see tremendous business opportunities in serving the high-growth power electronics market with SiC displacing silicon solutions due to its higher efficiency, higher switching frequency and higher-temperature characteristics,” says Sanan IC’s CEO Raymond Cai. “The enormous growth of the automotive, big data, renewable clean energy and power utility industries has created opportunities for us to offer SiC foundry services to the global market,” he adds.

Sanan IC’s SiC process technology offers device structures for 650V, 1200V and higher-rated Schottky barrier diodes (SBD), to be followed soon by a SiC MOSFET process for 900V, 1200V and higher. Due to their higher performance, SiC SBDs and MOSFETs are emerging for power conversion applications starting from 650V. Given the superior properties of SiC over silicon in terms of higher efficiency, increased power density, higher switching frequency, higher temperature, higher breakdown strength, and more compact and lighter system design, several applications have started to embrace this technology, says the firm.

The adoption of SiC has accelerated into multiple markets such as in photovoltaic solar cells, industrial motor drives, power factor correction (PFC) for enterprise server, and telecom base-station power supplies. In electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EV/HEV), SiC is widely used in the on-board charger (OBC), power train inverters and DC/DC converters. According to the ‘Power SiC 2018: Materials, Devices, and Applications Report’ by market research firm Yole Développement, the SiC power device semiconductor market is rising at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31% from 2017 to over $1.5bn in 2023.

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Sanan IC extends III-V foundry from Greater China to North American, European and APAC markets

Tags: Sanan OptoElectronics

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