Title: Silicon Carbide Power Electronics: Challenges and Opportunities

Speaker: Prof. James A. Cooper（Purdue University, USA）  

Time: May. 26, 2016 10:00AM 

Venue: Academic Conference Center, IOS, CAS 

Abstract: It was recognized as early as 1989 that electronic power devices in silicon were approaching their theoretical limits, and progress could only be made by moving to a semiconductor with a wider bandgap. Silicon carbide (SiC) is a compound semiconductor with a bandgap 3x wider than silicon. Single-crystal SiC wafers are now available from multiple suppliers in diameters up to 150 mm, making it possible to produce SiC power devices on retiring 150 mm silicon production lines. SiC Schottky diodes have been in commercial production since 2001, and SiC metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors (MOSFETs) entered commercial production in 2010.

SiC is similar to silicon in many aspects, but there are important differences that come as a surprise to those familiar with silicon. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of these differences, discuss the current status of SiC power MOSFETs, and mention some of the opportunities for significant advances in the next five years.

References:

[1] Cooper Jr, James A., et al. IEEE Transactions on 49(4), 2002.

[2] Cooper Jr, James A., et al. Electron Device Letters, IEEE 18(3), 1997.

[3] Cooper Jr, James A., et al. Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on 57(2), 2010.

Biography：James Cooper is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University and president of Sonrisa Research, Inc. He received his PhD from Purdue in 1973 and was member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ from 1973 to 1983, where he designed the Bell System’s first CMOS microprocessor and developed a novel time-of-flight technique for characterizing high-field transport in silicon inversion layers.

In 1983 he joined the faculty of Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. At Purdue his research centered on GaAs integrated circuits and electronic devices in the wide-bandgap semiconductor SiC. His group developed the first planar DMOSFETs in SiC and a novel self-aligned short-channel process that is used in commercial DMOSFETs worldwide. In 30 years at Purdue he has graduated 27 PhD students and been principal investigator on over $30 million in funded research projects. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1993, and served as founding co-director of the $58 million Birck Nanotechnology Center at Purdue.