Abstract – Over the last two decades there has been much exhilaration about the anticipated transformation of power electronics that SiC devices would bring, which has been accompanied by tremendous efforts of governments and companies to meet those expectations. The successful commercial use of SiC Schottky diodes over the last ten years has helped improve efficiency and reduce size of power converters in several applications, but only in the last couple of years several SiC active switching devices became commercially available at reasonable cost and volumes. CPES has been involved all-along in characterizing the newest SiC devices and evaluating their potential to change existing applications and open completely new ones.
The presentation will review the state-of-the-art and summarize CPES experiences in evaluating the use of SiC devices in dc-dc, ac-dc (single- and three-phase) and dc-ac power converters, as well as in three-phase motor drives, for transportation and higher power applications, ranging from kilowatts to megawatts. It will be shown that SiC devices can provide tangible improvements to existing applications so that their adoption will be mostly determined by the converter cost tradeoff. On the other hand, SiC opens two previously unachievable sorts of applications: power converters where power semiconductor devices operate at high-temperatures (> 200 ºC), and high-power conversion in the megawatt range with switching frequencies in tens of kilohertz. In these new applications, the SiC adoption is mostly governed by the system cost tradeoffs and will be fundamentally limited by the availability of other materials, passive devices, sensors, packaging, and system integration technologies that can operate at high-temperature, high-power and high-frequency.
