News: Microelectronics
11 April 2024
Coherent secures $15m in CHIPS Act funding via CLAWS Hub
Materials, networking and laser technology firm Coherent Corp of Saxonburg, PA, USA has secured $15m in funding from the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act of 2022 that provided the US Department of Defense (DoD) with $2bn to strengthen and revitalize the US semiconductor supply chain.
A key objectives of the CHIPS program is to nurture ecosystems that reduce risk, incentivizing large-scale private investment in production, breakthrough technologies, and workers. The DoD, through the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division and the National Security Technology Accelerator, hence established eight Microelectronics Commons regional innovation hubs in September, including the Commercial Leap Ahead for Wide-Bandgap Semiconductors (CLAWS) Hub based in North Carolina and led by NC State University. As a member of the CLAWS Hub, Coherent will receive $15m to accelerate the commercialization of next-generation wide- and ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors, namely silicon carbide and single-crystal diamond, respectively.
“Wide- and ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors enable the electrification of transportation, including road vehicles, high-speed trains, and mobile industrial machinery,” notes Sohail Khan, executive VP, Wide-Bandgap Electronics. “They also enable smart power grids to efficiently respond to fluctuations in energy demands by regulating the delivery of electricity from conventional and renewable sources to distribution networks, as well as to and from utility-scale power storage and micro-grids.”
In addition to DoD requirements for high-voltage, high-power applications and systems including hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), More Electric Aircraft (MEA) components, directed energy, Navy vessel power systems, and all-electric ships, silicon carbide power electronics are increasingly recognized for their potential to greatly improve the energy efficiency of artificial intelligence (AI) data centers and traditional hyperscale data centers, where power consumption is growing rapidly due to the exploding demand for data- and compute-intensive workloads from AI, cryptocurrency mining, and blockchain applications.
Single-crystal diamond promises to exceed the performance of silicon carbide and greatly expand the applications universe with quantum computing, quantum encryption, and quantum sensing.
Coherent’s silicon carbide business completes $1bn in investments from DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric
