Power Electronics Europe February/March 2022

MARKET NEWS 11 www.power-mag.com Issue 1 2022 Power Electronics Europe The Villach site is currently preparing for further growth opportunities. The company is also investing more than € 2 billion to build a third module at its site in Kulim, Malaysia. Once fully equipped, the new module will generate € 2 billion in additional annual revenue with products based on SiC and GaN. The expansion will benefit from the economies of scale already achieved for 200-mm manufacturing in Kulim and will complement the 300- mm manufacturing in Villach and Dresden. “Thus we are creating a winning combination of our development competence center in Villach and cost- effective production in Kulim for wide bandgap power semiconductors,” Hanebeck underlined. In the first stage of expansion, the chips will primarily be used to meet demand from the automotive industry, data centers and renewable energy generation of solar and wind power. The annual capacity planned for industrial semiconductors is sufficient to equip solar systems producing a total of around 1,500 TWh of electricity – roughly three times the annual power consumption in Germany. During the construction of the factory, attention was paid to further improve its energy balance sheet: 80 % of the site’s heating requirements will be covered by intelligently recycling the waste heat of the cooling systems, thus around 20,000 tons of CO 2 can be avoided each year. The extensive use of exhaust air purification systems will cut direct emissions to virtually zero. Another milestone is the production and recycling of green hydrogen. The hydrogen required as a process gas in production will be produced directly on-site in Villach from renewable energy sources starting at the beginning of 2022. This green hydrogen will be recycled after use in chip production and used to fuel public transportation buses. The new chip factory has about 60,000 m? of gross floor space. Production will be gradually ramped up over the next four to five years. The Villach-site is also part of a so-called virtual fab. “Infineon now has two large power semiconductor manufacturing sites for 300-millimeter thin wafers, one in Dresden and this in Villach. Both sites are based on the same standardized production and digitization concepts. This allows us to control the manufacturing operations at the two sites as if they were one factory. We increase productivity and create additional flexibility. This is because we can quickly move production volumes for different products between the sites and thus respond even faster to customer needs. This makes further increases in resource and energy efficiency possible, as well as optimization of the environmental footprint,” underlined coming CEO Jochen Hanebeck. “The chips are manufactured on thin wafers, which at 40 micrometers are thinner than a human hair. Villach is the Group’s center of expertise for power semiconductors and has long been an important innovation site in Infineon’s manufacturing network. It was here that the production of power semiconductors on 300-millimeter wafers was developed about ten years ago. This was then expanded to fully automated volume production at the Dresden site in recent years. The use of this technology brings significant productivity advantages due to the larger wafer diameter and reduces capital expenditure”. The Villach site will continue to serve as the innovation base and global competence center for wide bandgap technology by converting existing Silicon facilities over the next years. 150- and 299-mm Silicon lines will be converted to SiC and GaN manufacturing by repurposing non-specific Silicon equipment. Frontend manufacturing site of Infineon in Kulim, Malaysia Source (2): Infineon Technologies IVWorks Acquires Saint-Gabain’s GaN Wafer Activities To strengthen the competitiveness in the EV market with GaN-on-GaN epiwafers the race for efficiency with SiC in the high-power devices market is opened. GaN epi-wafer is a material comprising multi-stacked III-N compound semiconductor films on a wafer. It is used in high-speed chargers, EV power conversion, and defense radars. SiC or Si wafer is used to stack III-N films depending on the application field, but GaN wafers are required in high-power devices such as EV powertrains. Saint-Gobain in France and some Japanese material companies, such as Sumitomo and Mitsubishi, are leading production technology of GaN wafers. With the acquisition of the GaN wafer business from Saint-Gobain, South Korean IVWorks has acquired state-of-the-art technology for mass production of 4- and 6-inch GaN wafers. Saint-Gobain designs, manufactures and distributes materials and services for the construction and industrial markets, and developed the core technology to create state-of-the art GaN wafers that is better leveraged by a company solely focused on this opportunity. IVWorks is the sole South Korean enterprise specializing in semiconductor materials that has successfully mass-produced GaN epi-wafers of 4-, 6-, and 8-inch. It has to its credit the in-house development of the world’s first epi-wafer production technology integrated with an artificial intelligence production system. The pioneering start-up has also recently installed a 12-inch production facility, for the first time in South Korea. “Recently, the use of GaN power devices are increasing significantly in all electronic products due to their advantages in terms of energy efficiency, and interest in GaN is high in the EV applications, a new market. Based on this acquisition, we will be able to expand our product portfolio by supplying GaN- on-GaN epi-wafers in high-power application fields and compete with SiC materials in the EV market,” CEO Young-Kyun Noh of IVWorks commented. www.ivwkr.com/ South Korean start-up IVworks announced in January that they acquired Saint-Gobain’s GaN wafer business Source: IVWorks