[HN Gopher] What's down the road for silicon?
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What's down the road for silicon?
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 23 points
Date : 2022-05-16 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220516161310/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.ph/dKV1U
| kurthr wrote:
| What an odd article.
|
| It talks about the move from Si switching power supplies to
| SiC... and now to GaN. This has been going on for years to the
| point that many new high power wall plugs are moving to GaN. It's
| true that EVs need power efficient supplies and drive part of the
| market, but I don't see evidence that they've radically
| accelerated the shift.
|
| I don't see evidence that SiC or GaN supplies are noticeably more
| available (other than being higher margin and thus more likely to
| be prioritized) than Si with shipping issues and the Shanghai
| shutdown. I also don't see evidence that location of volume
| (lower margin) manufacturing are likely to be different for these
| SiC/GaN components until geopolitical events push them to.
| Certainly, component assembly is unlikely to shift to the US.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It's a bit garbled as you'd expect from a non-specialist
| publication, but I thought it did a decent job of highlighting
| recent trends in wide band gap power electronics. I think that
| battery electric vehicles are the "killer app" bringing silicon
| carbide to the mainstream. The technology itself has been
| developing for a long time, certainly, but BEVs combine some
| key attributes to drive SiC demand:
|
| - Efficiency has a high value, since a dollar's worth of SiC
| electronics can save more than a dollar's worth of battery
| capacity to reach the same driving range. Vehicle range is one
| of the key attributes for prospective BEV buyers.
|
| - The devices need to handle high power, which mostly rules out
| gallium nitride for vehicle power trains at present.
|
| - The market is large and growing rapidly, thereby justifying
| forward looking investments in new manufacturing capacity (like
| the New York fab mentioned in the article).
| kurthr wrote:
| I'll agree EVs are scaling the business since they use very
| large areas (roughly proportional to peak power) and they
| certainly have high marginal utility due to battery cost. In
| particular, just 1million EVs with 300kW supplies are 300GW
| of power supply, while 200Million mobile chargers at 80W are
| only 16GW of power supply area.
|
| Still, the size of the market is only ~$1B growing to $3B
| over the next 5 years.
|
| It's also worth noting that GaN can also be grown on SiC
| wafers so there is utility even when the industry shifts to
| even higher performance. I didn't realize that 5G base
| stations were also a significant consumer of GaN.
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/now/sic-wafer-market-growth-
| trends-100...
| nikanj wrote:
| If efficiency had high value, cars would look very different.
| We'll end up repeating the same "I've got a V8 F-350 for my
| office commute" thing with electric vehicles
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Bosch opened a new fab recently.
| https://www.golem.de/news/halbleiterwerk-bosch-beginnt-bau-n...
| hristov wrote:
| Pretty good article for the new york times non-technical
| audience. Power electronics is becoming and will become ever more
| important with everything around us getting electrified and
| silicon carbide and gallium nitride will become more important
| within it.
|
| Couple of things that I do not agree with: I am not sure whether
| the silicon shortage has really helped adoption of wide bandgap
| semiconductors. I think the answer is maybe yes for the cheaper
| gallium nitride, probably not for silicon carbide. Silicon
| carbide is arguably in bigger shortage than silicon.
|
| And also I would not get excited about the new shiny things like
| diamond and gallium oxide. In this field it takes a lot of time
| to bring a new thing online. Customers tend to have very
| stringent reliability requirements. And bringing production to
| the quality and profitability levels of silicon carbide and
| gallium nitride will require a lot of investment over many years.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| How about photonic circuits?
| galcerte wrote:
| You can't transmit large amounts of power through a photonic
| circuit, so forget about using them to replace power
| electronics.
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| Photonics doesn't buy you much.
|
| The primarily limit on speed in large chips like processors is
| NOT the transistors but the transmission lines connecting the
| transistors. And those are already operating at 50%-75% of the
| speed of light. The gain going to photonics doesn't justify the
| cost at this point.
|
| Another factor: pretty much EVERYTHING in current
| microelectronics gets dumped in the garbage if you were to 100%
| switch to photonics and that's a step too far. There is
| relatively little in electronics that can be leveraged to
| photonics.
|
| In general you need about 80% overlap with the prior major
| technology to justify a jump that big. This was true of tubes
| to transistors, and then transistors to ICs. You'd see the
| exact same circuit used in the prior technology being
| repurposed to the new one - almost verbatim. And it's that
| leverage that justifies the inevitable higher cost of any new
| technology - at least you can re-use designs, skills and
| concepts.
| simonh wrote:
| They're still at the basic research stage, with no real path to
| practical applications yet.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Perhaps someone here can answer this, but why are wide-bandgap
| materials like SiC and GaN considered so promising for power
| applications but not more traditional semiconductor applications
| (CPUs, GPUs, SOCs, etc)? Seems like the ability to perform more
| efficiently and at higher power efficiency should be useful there
| too.
|
| Is it just an issue of not being able to make crystals of the
| same defect-less purity that we've achieved for silicon? And is
| it a fundamental issue, or one that can be overcome by developing
| a similar level of expertise?
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