Electric vehicle industry to drive SiC growth

The electric and hybrid electric vehicle market is set to drive the silicon carbide (SiC) technology adoption, according to research firm Yole Développement.

In 2014, the SiC chip business was worth more than US$133 million. Like previous years, power factor correction (PFC) and photovoltaics (PV) are still the leading applications.

“Today SiC diodes represent more than 80% of the global market. And in 2020, diodes will remain the main contributor across various applications, including electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EV/HEV), PV, PFC, wind, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and motor drives,” said Dr Hong Lin, technology and market analyst at Yole.

“Challenges must be overcome prior to the adoption of pure SiC solutions for EV power train inverters, which is nevertheless expected by 2020. Including the growth in both diodes and transistors, at Yole, we expect the total SiC market to more than treble by 2020, reaching US$436 million,” said Dr Lin. Yole’s report expects a rapid growth, especially from 2016.

In their report, Yole’s analysts highlight the huge research and development investments made by the automotive companies within the wide bandgap (WBG) area. “Such strategies will clearly make innovations easier and trigger more and more business opportunities,” said Pierric Gueguen, business unit manager at Yole. “In the automotive area, numerous R&D departments are currently working on the development of new solutions. At Yole, we stay convinced that such strategies will allow an important breakthrough in this sector, in the near future,” he added.

In parallel, several SiC devices makers are now offering or are going to offer automotive-qualified devices. This step underlines their willingness to enter the automotive industry and answer to the specific needs of automotive players. In the past, some car makers complained about the lack of large volume SiC devices suppliers: “This situation may also evolve quickly, especially if more and more SiC players achieve their automotive certification,” said Pierric Gueguen. And he said, “At Yole, we expect such large volume strategies could lead the SiC technology price erosion.”

This technology and market analysis is part of Yole’s latest SiC & GaN report. To discover a detailed description, go to i-micronews.com, compound semiconductor reports section.