On December 10, SDK (Showa Denko) announced that DENSO, a Toyota group’s main production system for automotive air conditioning, ignition, and fuel injection, will use the company`s silicon carbide epitaxial wafers for Manufacturing of next-generation supercharged power modules for fuel cell electric vehicles.
According to SDK, its silicon carbide epitaxy is currently used by electronic equipment manufacturers to include power supplies for cloud computing system servers, fast charging piles for electric vehicles, and rail transit. The SDK silicon carbide epitaxial wafer has stable performance, low surface defects, and low dislocation frequency, so it is adopted by DENSO.
Compared with the current mainstream silicon-based semiconductors, SiC-based power semiconductors can work under high temperature, high voltage, and high current conditions, and can greatly reduce energy loss. These features enable equipment manufacturers to produce smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient power control modules. The SDK expects that in 2025 and beyond, SiC power semiconductors will be fully used as part of the power control unit (PCU) of electric vehicles, with a market size of about 100 billion yen. Therefore, the demand for SiC-based power semiconductors is expected to grow further.