News

26 August 2009

 

SemiSouth awarded new SiC power JFET patents

SemiSouth of Starkville, MS, USA has been awarded its third US patent of 2009, and its 18 th overall in SiC power electronics technology. The patents cover methods of making normally-off SiC JFETs, self-aligned SiC fabrication methods, and the integration of SiC JFET, diodes, and circuits. 

Dr Jeff Casady, chief technology officer & VP of business development, says that the recent patents were the result of focused efforts, led by SemiSouth engineers, in pushing the technology forward for both near-term and long-term products. “Our normally-off SiC JFET, the most energy efficient and cost-effective SiC power transistor switch, is an extremely important product to SemiSouth. After sampling the product globally for over one year, we are seeing very positive signs of adoption by our customer base in solar inverters, telecom power supplies, and other applications,” he adds.

“These specific patents allow us to further strength the intellectual property we have around the normally-off SiC JFET, including different process designs and methods to integrate for added chip functionality in the future,” comments Dr David Sheridan, director of engineering.

SiC can enable energy-efficient operation of power conversion and power management in telecom power supplies, inverters in solar and high-frequency welding, future automotive electric vehicle platforms, and many other products, says SemiSouth. The promise of SiC is its ability to make power supplies and power inverters up to 50-75% more energy efficient, operate at up to 4-8 times higher frequency, and as a result run cooler and be physically much smaller in size (e.g. SiC power JFETs are expected to increase the ‘fuel’ efficiency of hybrid electric vehicles and help make them more affordable).

See related items:

SemiSouth helps drive Fraunhofer ISE’s PV inverters to world record efficiency

SemiSouth receives SBIR contract to develop new class of high-speed JFETs

Search: SemiSouth SiC JFETs

Visit: www.semisouth.com