How tight are power semiconductors? Bosch personally produced hundreds of millions of silicon carbide chips.

The list of winners of high-quality units of 2021 China stainless Steel & Metal charging Conference has been announced! You are invited to witness the award ceremony.

Bosch announced today that it has begun to expand the production of SiC power semiconductors with a target production capacity of hundreds of millions of units. At the same time, Bosch began to develop a second-generation SiC chip with higher power density, which is expected to be put into mass production next year. The company will also become the only auto parts supplier that independently produces SiC chips.

Two years ago, Bosch announced that it would continue to promote the research and development of SiC chips and begin to produce samples for customer verification at the beginning of this year. Bosch has secured "considerable" orders for SiC chips due to high demand for new energy vehicles-the main driver of its capacity expansion, according to board members.

The company has built an additional 1000 square meters dust-free workshop for SiC chip production; the company plans to build another 3000 square meters dust-free workshop by the end of 2023.

In addition, expanding the wafer area of the substrate is also a means for Bosch to improve production efficiency. At present, the industry mainly uses 6-inch wafers to produce SiC semiconductors, while 8-inch wafers are the development direction. From 6 inches to 8 inches, the available manufacturing area of each wafer has almost doubled, and the production capacity has almost doubled.

The production expansion trend of automobile and photovoltaic dual-drive SiC industry appears frequently.

What is the concept of "hundreds of millions"?

This year's data show that Sanan Integrated completed the layout of the SiC diode product line from 650V to 1700V, with a cumulative shipment of more than one million pieces; in April this year, South Korea's third-generation semiconductor manufacturer Yes Power reached a cooperation with a Chinese company on SiC chips, which is expected to supply about 80 million SiC chips to the latter by December 2025.

By comparison, it shows Bosch's ambition to expand production. Bosch is not alone on the road to large-scale expansion of SiC production.

On November 23rd, Luxiao Technology and Tony Technology announced that the former intends to raise no more than 2.94 billion yuan to increase investment in SiC, and its subsidiary Hefei Luxiao has reached strategic cooperation with Dongguan Tianyu to form strategic purchase orders of not less than 150000 in three years. The latter will be officially launched, and the fund-raising project will include the SiC semiconductor material project with an annual output of 120000 pieces.

Further push forward, Changsheng Electric, Japan's Showa Electric, South Korea's SK Group have recently announced SiC-related production expansion plans, and the amount of investment / capacity expansion is not low.

Behind the intensive expansion of industrial chain manufacturers is the huge demand for SiC power devices brought by new energy vehicles and photovoltaic.

Among them, for new energy vehicles, SiC power devices can increase the conversion efficiency from 96% to more than 99%, reduce energy loss by more than 50%, and increase the cycle life of equipment by 50 times. The agency expects automotive inverters to bring a market of 59 to 6.5 billion US dollars for SiC in 2025.

In recent years, the quarterly photovoltaic installation has grown rapidly, and analysts are also optimistic about its driving role in the demand for SiC power devices.

In addition, prices, which were previously seen as a major obstacle to the promotion of SiC, are also gradually falling. From the point of view of the open quotation in the market, the actual transaction price of 1200V SiC SBD and the price difference of silicon devices has narrowed to 2-2.5 times, reaching the "sweet spot".

San'an Optoelectronics even said bluntly before that, now the bottleneck of SiC is no longer price, but production capacity. The silicon device of a car is 2000-3000 yuan, while the SiC is 6000-7000 yuan, which is "inexpensive".