Gallery: APEC 2017 — Hot markets moving cool speed ahead

Making the case for SiC Cascodes

United Silicon Carbide, Inc. (USCi) kicked off the first day of the exhibition with a morning seminar to announce their distribution agreement with Richardson Electronics and to reinforce the message that the SiC market is at the tipping point and that their SiC power devices rival silicon superjunction and GaN-based devices. To date, SiC adoption has been impeded by cost but not only is capacitance dropping, but the recent use of 6″ die means more chips can be produced.

“How does JFET cascode compare to SiC MOSFETS?” they ask. “It’s everything a MOSFET would like to but better,” said Christopher Rocneau, Director Sales, “and with inductive switching at 800V, 30A it is intrinsically extremely fast in the way it turns off. That’s an important distinction we want to make to our customers,” he concluded.

The company maintains that designers can replace IGBTs, SiC MOSFETS or Si Superjunction devices with no change to gate drive voltages.