Future high temperature applications for SiC integrated circuits

The main advantage of SiC is its high critical field for breakdown. This leads to much lower on‐resistance for high voltage devices compared to silicon, but at a higher price that has to be offset by system gains. However, it is not straightforward to exploit this advantage, which is clear from the many different device types that are presently being commercialized. There are other advantages of SiC yet to be fully investigated: the possibility of high temperature operating electronics and radiation hard devices. If integrated circuits in SiC are also available, the system advantage is larger. Here temperature ranges higher than that of SOI should be aimed at, and some of these new application areas will be described. An overview of IC research will be ended with a description of our selected technology operated at 300 °C (© 2012 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)