Doug Bailey
VP of Marketing, Power Integrations

讲师简介 / Speaker Bio

Mr. Bailey joined Power Integrations in 2004 as vice president of marketing. Prior to joining PI, Mr. Bailey served as vice president of marketing at ChipX, a structured-ASIC company. His earlier experience includes serving as business management and marketing consultant for Sapiential Prime, Inc.., director of sales and business unit manager for 8x8, Inc., application engineering management for IIT, Inc. and design engineering roles with LSI Logic, Inmos, Ltd. and Marconi.

摘要 / Abstract

As the world’s decarbonization efforts expand to a forecasted annual investment of $5 Trillion per year by 2030 [source: IEC-International Electrotechnical Commission], the role of power semiconductors and associated systems has grown in importance for power generation, transmission and consumption, covering applications such as wind and solar, electric transportation of all kinds, datacenters, lighting and consumer products. Over the last 50 years the technology for high voltage, high current power switches morphed from thyristors to IGBTs and is now transitioning to so called “wide bandgap” materials – the most commercially consequential of which is silicon carbide. But in addition to being important, silicon carbide is also relatively easy to make and a rather obvious ploy for big semiconductor companies. Consequentially, a very large amount of capacity has come online over the last 5 years and the world is oversupplied with the material.

It’s likely that the world-wide return on investment in silicon carbide will not improve because new technologies are snapping at its heels – gallium nitride is one such disruptive technology. Not only does GaN have better performance than SiC at a performance level, it’s also cheaper to make because it does not require high temperature processing and so the equipment needed is cheaper and the foundry electric bill is much lower. GaN’s one weakness has been its breakdown voltage performance, which limited the technology to consumer products and mains-power applications such as cellphones chargers, TVs and appliance bias supplies. Until now. Power Integrations is on an accelerated R&D path to replace SiC with high voltage GaN, has released 750V, 900V, 1250V and now 1700V GaN based products in recent years, and hinted at even higher voltage GaN R&D in progress. This paper explains at a high level what GaN’s capabilities are vs. SiC and IGBT and proposes a commercial roadmap for the technology into the future.