back to article SiC move: STMicroelectronics banks on bringing power electronics material in house as electric cars rev up

Unnerved by a pre-pandemic electronics materials shortage, STMicroelectronics took the decision to start bringing its supply chain for silicon carbide in house, from substrates to end products. Now the chip maker says its annual revenues from the semiconductor, used in electric cars and other machines and systems, will hit ten …

  1. Tom 7

    What sort of costs are these things?

    Silicon can pretty much cover all of small scale renewables and domestic vehicle and storage charging which I would imagine would be the largest market for the foreseeable and I'd imagine its going to take a little while to get down to those sort of (artificially held high) prices.

  2. Death Boffin

    SIC is hard

    I wish them luck, growing SiC substrates is much harder than silicon. So they will always be more expensive than silicon devices.

    The performance of SiC is so much better than silicon that it is worth the extra cost. These devices can handle voltages in the 1500 volt range. They have 10 times the thermal conductivity of silicon, the better to get the heat out. This is just what you need for electric cars.

    GaN has better electrical performance than SiC, but is usually grown on a SiC substrate.

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