
Infineon in 1700V IGBT boost
Infineon Technologies has completed its project €74m project to built 1700V IGBT power transistors on 300mm silicon wafers.
The Power2Power project brought together 43 partners from industry and research in eight countries over the last three years.
For electric vehicles in particular the development boosts efficiency to 98% with 200°C junction temperature, taking on silicon carbide directly. At the same time the developments boost lifetime by 50% and cuts the cost of a drivetrain inverter by a third with 10% lower losses.
Infineon makes power devices on silicon, silicon carbide and gallium nitride for a range of applications at different cost points.
The follow-on project, called PowerizeD, will start as early as January with a consortium of 62 partners. This will focus on the digitalization of power electronics applications.
Power2power was led by Infineon Technologies Dresden to boost the voltage, reliability and robustness of the transistors for transport and heavy industrial applications such as battery systems and chargers for electric vehicles and high-speed drives, power supplies for welding technology and for renewable energy storage in the grid.
The results will be exploited in Europe in large-scale productions: wafer substrate, wafer processing, assembly, packaging and modules.
The European Union funded the collaboration as part of the ECSEL program (Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership). In the meantime, the new Key Digital Technologies (KDT) Joint Undertaking has taken over the ongoing activities of the ECSEL program.
“Power electronics is one of the most important key industries in Europe and will be of central importance if we in Europe are to achieve our climate goals,” says Yves Gigase, Acting Executive Director of the KDT Joint Undertaking.
“In the collaborative Power2Power project, the 43 consortium partners successfully developed novel solutions that will sustainably strengthen the competitiveness of the European microelectronics industry and increase its manufacturing share in the global market,” he said.
“The project made significant improvements in particular in technology, resulting among other things in greater reliability. It also set up a pilot line for the future large series volume production of IGBT chips.”
www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/power2power/
