Infineon has produced working power devices on 300mm silicon carbide wafers, using existing silicon manufacturing equipment at its Villach fab in Austria.
According to Electronics Weekly the German chipmaker says this is the first such demonstration in a full-scale semiconductor factory. It will show the processed wafer at electronica in Munich.
Infineon says a 300mm wafer can provide about 2.3 times as many chips as a 200mm wafer. More devices from each wafer could improve production economics, provided yields and processing costs behave themselves. Merely making the wafer larger does not settle those questions.
Silicon carbide handles high voltages and temperatures with lower conversion losses than conventional silicon power devices in suitable applications. Electric vehicle inverters are an obvious market.
The material has further applications in industrial drives and charging equipment. Data centre power supplies offer another customer group with rapidly rising electricity bills.
Infineon has demonstrated functional devices, although it has not announced that commercial production on the larger wafers is ready to begin.
The outfit says it will agree the technology and production timetable with customers and partners. Its existing 200mm silicon carbide manufacturing programme continues.
Infineon has supplied no production yield figures or customer shipment dates for the larger format. Those will determine how quickly the demonstration becomes a business.
Infineon has separately demonstrated its Cold Split process on 300mm silicon carbide at Dresden. The technique separates wafers from a crystal with less material waste.
Conventional wire sawing sacrifices some of an expensive crystal during cutting. Recovering more usable wafers offers another way to cut costs.
The company announced a roughly €1.1 billion investment in 300mm gallium nitride manufacturing at Villach on 27 October. The new demonstration concerns a different material. Infineon will display the processed silicon carbide wafer at electronica from 10 to 13 November, in Hall C3 at stand 502.
