INDUSTRY FOCUS Delivering on GaN
Denis Marcon, general manager sales and marketing Europe and USA at Innoscience discusses the rapidly evolving market for power GaN devices
T
he power GaN market is expanding very rapidly. It’s hard to predict exactly how rapidly because the situation is changing all the time. Therefore when analysts such as Transparency Market Research predict sales of power GaN devices are likely to surpass $2.5B by 2031 with the market expanding at a CAGR of 40.3%, yet fail to report on two of the industry’s key players, one must treat absolute figures with some degree of caution (we believe that the GaN market will be way bigger than that already in 2025). But while the exact numbers may be hard to pin down, the growth is undeniable. The last 18 months have seen GaN emerge as the technology of choice for smart device adapters and chargers with leading brands such as Apple, Anker, OPPO and Xiaomi basing new, sleek chargers on GaN thanks to the efficiency and high power performance of GaN switches.
Those same advantages – higher power, greater efficiency, smaller size – also play well in many other markets. Other sectors such as automotive, data centres, LED drivers, renewable energy, consumer audio and phone handsets, accepted or are beginning to accept that GaN’s superior switching performance is suitable for their applications too.
So what’s holding up a tsunami of GaN applications? First, devices must be rugged and reliable. Second they must be simple to use. Thirdly, devices must be available in large volumes in order to guarantee security of supply – this is especially apposite given today’s well-publicised semiconductor
shortage crisis. Lastly, of course – and probably, if truth were told, the main reason why customers are reluctant to take up new technologies – there is price: the industry is not willing to pay a big premium for GaN. Innoscience was formed in December 2015 to address all these points. Let’s just start with one unequivocal statement: Innoscience has the world’s largest 8-inch wafer GaN-on-Si facilities. We’ll come back to that. Innoscience has developed its own InnoGaN technology. GaN is inherently a normally on process, but system and application engineers demand normally off. This caused early users some issues as driving GaN became more complex. Companies have solved this issue in a number of ways, primarily by using a cascode approach with a discrete or co-packaged driver. While these approaches are an interesting solution to the problem, they have some limitation in terms of cost and packaging size. Innoscience grows a p-GaN layer on top of the AlGaN barrier, forming a Schottky contact with the p-GaN layer, resulting in normally-off/e-mode operation.
Innoscience’s InnoGaN technology has one other significant benefit: a very low RDS(on). The company has developed a strain enhancement layer technology, which consists of the deposition of a specific layer after the gate stack definition. The stress modulation created by the strain enhancement layer induces additional piezoelectric polarizations; this causes the 2DEG density to increase and thus the sheet resistance to decrease by 66% compared with a device without strain layer. Thanks to this innovation, Innoscience’s GaN-on-Si e-mode HEMTs shows very low specific on- resistance.
Having addressed performance and ease- of-use challenges, Innoscience saw that what was stopping GaN becoming the dominant power switching technology was down to volume. Device availability (or lack of) causes concerns over security of supply; on the other hand, large volume availability leads to economies of scale and lower prices. For this reason, Innoscience decided to focus solely on 8-in wafer fabrication from the very start of the company – while all other producers
14 NOVEMBER 2022 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
are on 6-inch or even 4-inch processes. Innoscience today has a capacity of 10,000 8-inch wafers per month, which will ramp up to 14,000 8-inch wafers per month later this year, and 70,000 8-inch wafers per month by 2025. And yield is also very high. This is because Innoscience is using the latest manufacturing technology – proven on silicon devices – plus it has optimised the EPI and wafer processing. Because Innoscience is a fully-integrated company, controlling all manufacturing stages from device design, through EPI and wafer processing to failure & reliability analysis – i.e. full GaN-on-Si production – the company also ensures high quality. The original Innoscience fab (a second is also in operation) is already qualified to ISO9001 and the IATF 16949:2016 certification for automotive use, and Innoscience GaN HEMTs are qualified to the JEDEC standard. Innoscience also performs more advance reliability tests. So, to summarise, Innoscience has entered the market with reliable, high- performance GaN parts that address both low voltage 30-150V and high 650V applications. The company, unlike the rest of the semiconductor (and wider electronics) market has no shortages of supply – product is available in volume now – and prices are in-line with market demands. Stand by for the avalanche of applications to emerge!
Innoscience
www.innoscience.com
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