Introduction
The semiconductor industry has a well-established history of “smaller, faster, and cheaper.” Improving performance and reducing device cost while shrinking packaging size is fundamental to virtually every semiconductor product type. For power products, improved performance is measured by increased efficiency and power density, higher power handling capability, and wider operating temperature range. Such improvements depend largely on the desirable characteristics of power components used, such as low switching and conduction losses, high switching frequency, stable electrical characteristics over a wide temperature range, high operating temperature, and high blocking voltage. As silicon power components approach their theoretical limits, compound semiconductor materials, such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), provide the capability to dramatically improve these parameters.

Today, the need for higher efficiency in end products is more critical than ever. Although silicon power products continue to see incremental improvements, devices based on compound semiconductor materials deliver significantly better performance — in a large number of cases not possible with their silicon counterparts. This is certainly true for the most basic components in power electronics: diodes and transistors. Silicon carbide (SiC) Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) have been available for more than a decade but were not commercially viable until recently. As a pioneer in SiC technology, ROHM Semiconductor expects that volume production will lead to SiC’s acceptance in more and more applications.