he surge in electric vehicles and carbon reduction targets boosts the power semiconductor sector, creating opportunities in xEVs, charging systems, renewables, and datacenter power. High-efficiency components are crucial for EV powertrains and robust high-voltage management. Fast-charging infrastructure must meet strict standards. SiC and GaN materials surpass silicon in high-performance applications. This industry shift sparks investment in power semiconductors, promising continued growth and innovation.

Silicon devices, the workhorse of power conversion in the past 70 years, are reaching their physical limits and slowing down growth in efficiency of power inverters and converters. To overcome the limitations of silicon, power semiconductor industry has started to adopt wide bandgap materials and devices. Their higher current densities, higher operating temperatures and frequencies, and more efficient switching position the performance of wide bandgap power transistors above and beyond their silicon predecessors. Their disruptive nature, however, creates new challenges which need to be addressed in a systematic way to enable high yielding volume manufacturing of reliable devices. Crystal growth, wafering, epitaxy, wafer processing, and packaging of wide bandgap devices require a paradigm shift and an introduction of novel approaches and techniques. Vertically integrated manufacturing addresses most of those challenges and enables fast growth of wide bandgap power semiconductor business. In addition, co-existence with silicon power switches will be discussed.

Achieving very high-power efficiency at mmWave frequencies is critical for the deployment of 5G and 6G radio systems. Although compound semiconductors technologies promise to reduce the power consumption of high-power amplifiers, their low-cost fabrication on a CMOS compatible platform remains challenging. We introduce in this presentation a GaN-on-Si platform achieving 68% PAE at 28GHz. The reliability challenges will be highlighted, toghether with the transistor optimization using different materials for the front- and back-barriers.

n recent years the amount of available and suitable SiC substrates was limited and, hence, causing high effort to secure sufficient amount of raw material for the growth plans on 150mm device manufacturing. The transition to 200mm SiC device production has started and questions arise on the stable availability, the maturity, the price, the geopolitical situation for raw materials and the technological innovations around 200mm SiC raw material. Certain raw material players are intensively focusing on the transition to 200mm, others are still busy with ramping up 150mm raw material manufacturing capacity. Defect density and material quality investigations show a correlation between the suppliers’ efforts on 200mm crystal growth development and the outcome. This allows to speculate and to set up a prediction on the raw material situation in the next 3-5 years.

Inverters and thus power semiconductors, play a central role in electrification and are key for modern electric vehicles’ properties. Originated from silicon IGBTs, new technologies have established in the form of silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors. They can be used to achieve significantly higher system efficiencies and are state-of-the-art in the Volkswagen vehicle platforms currently under development. Not least because of the high cost of SiC semiconductors, GaN semiconductors are considered a potential successor technology.

Wide bandgap semiconductors such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors have emerged as crucial materials for advancing energy efficiency, particularly in the transportation sector. Beside integrated device manufacturers (IDM), foundries play an important role in the necessary upscaling of SiC and GaN manufacturing and in enabling access for fabless and fab-lite companies. The presentation will provide an overview of X-FAB as a leading foundry for automotive, industrial and medical applications and of the power electronics market from a froundry perspective, with specific focus on SiC and GaN. Beside the advantages of SiC and GaN for achieving power efficiency and and carbon neutrality goals, the presentation will also cover the challenges associated with integration SiC and GaN manufacturing into a CMOS manufacturing process. Finally, the presentation will conclude with an outlook of X-FAB’s technology- and manufacturing strategy for wide bandgap semiconductors.

The microelectronics industry, with its multiple applications across sectors including automotive, defense, health, energy and digital, is considered strategic in Europe. It is the focus of many public funding opportunities. The European semiconductor industry faces fierce competition at global scale. Europe has a strategic positioning in terms of innovation capacity, but factories tend to be located elsewhere due to a less favorable cost structure and massive public support in Asia. This is especially true for wafer production and front-end manufacturing, where the required investments are huge and increase with the performance of the most advanced chips. The European semiconductor ecosystem benefited from significant public funding in 2018 and 2023 through the IPCEI on Microelectronics (€1.9 billion for 43 projects in 4 Member States plus the United Kingdom) and the IPCEI ME/CT (€8.1 billion for 68 projects in 14 Member States) aimed at bolstering the European technological leadership, transforming it into market opportunities, and coordinating innovating players at all levels of the value chain . In addition, in 2022, the European Commission launched the European Chips Act, which facilitates the funding of first-of-a-kind microelectronic gigafactories in Europe, in order to strengthen the resilience of European industry with regards to these key enabling technologies. european economics has supported 34 projects in the microelectronics industry as part of these initiatives and has contributed in securing a total of €11.7 billion for its clients (wafer manufacturers, IDMs and foundries).