After several years of development, Bosch is now starting volume production of power semiconductors made of silicon carbide (SiC), supplying automotive manufacturers worldwide. In the future, more and more production vehicles will feature these chips, Bosch says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe future for silicon carbide semiconductors is bright. We want to become a global leader in the production of SiC chips for electromobility,\u201d says Harald Kroeger, member of the board of management of Robert Bosch GmbH.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two years ago, the supplier of technology and services had announced that it would push ahead with the development of SiC chips and enter production. For this, Bosch has developed its own highly complex manufacturing processes, which it has been using to produce the special semiconductors since the beginning of 2021 \u2013 initially as samples for customer validation. \u201cOur order books are full, thanks to the boom in electromobility,\u201d Kroeger says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the future, Bosch intends to expand its production capacity for SiC power semiconductors to a unit volume running into the hundreds of millions. With this in mind, the company has already started expanding the clean-room space at its Reutlingen plant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In parallel, work is also being done on the second generation of SiC chips, which will be even more efficient and should be ready for volume production as of 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Around the world, demand for silicon carbide power semiconductors is rising. A forecast by the market research and consulting company Yole indicates that, between now and 2025, the SiC market as a whole will grow on average by 30 percent a year to over 2.5 billion dollars. At around 1.5 billion dollars, the SiC car market is expected to account for the lion\u2019s share. \u201cSilicon carbide power semiconductors make particularly efficient use of energy. This material\u2019s advantages really come to the fore in energy-intensive applications such as electromobility,\u201d Kroeger says. In the power electronics of electric vehicles, silicon carbide chips ensure that drivers can drive significantly further on one battery charge \u2013 on average around 6 percent further than with their pure silicon counterparts. In order to meet steadily increasing demand for these semiconductors, an extra 1,000 square meters were already added to the clean-room space at the Bosch wafer fab in Reutlingen in 2021. Another 3,000 square meters will be added by the end of 2023. The new space will house state-of-the-art production facilities for manufacturing silicon carbide semiconductors using processes developed in-house. To achieve this, Bosch\u2019s semiconductor experts are building on their decades of expertise in chip manufacturing. In the future, the company \u2013 incidentally the only automotive supplier to produce its own silicon carbide chips \u2013 plans to manufacture the semiconductors on 200-millimeter wafers. Compared with today\u2019s 150-millimeter wafers, this will deliver sizeable economies of scale. After all, it takes several months for a single wafer to pass through several hundred process steps in countless machines. \u201cBy producing on larger wafers, we can manufacture significantly more chips in one production run and thus supply more customers,\u201d Kroeger says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After several years of development, Bosch is now starting volume production of power semiconductors made of silicon carbide (SiC), supplying automotive manufacturers worldwide. In the future, more and more production vehicles will feature these chips, Bosch says. \u201cThe future for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48,54,56],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10748,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10745\/revisions\/10748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.automotive-today.ro\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}