On April 10, Coherent (formerly II-VI) announced today.
The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 provides $2 billion to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to strengthen and revitalize the U.S. semiconductor supply chain. One of the main goals of the CHIPS program is to foster a risk-reducing ecosystem that incentivizes large-scale private investment in production, breakthrough technologies, and workers.
To that end, the U.S. Department of Defense, through the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division and the National Security Technology Accelerator, established eight microelectronics shared regional innovation centers in September, including the North Carolina-based Center for Commercial Leaps in Wide-Bandgap Semiconductors (CLAWS), led by North Carolina State University. As a member of the CLAWS Hub, Coherent will receive $15 million to accelerate the commercialization of next-generation wide bandgap and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors, silicon carbide and single crystal diamond, respectively.
"We are pleased to be a recipient of the CHIPS Act, to be part of the CLAWS Center, and to be proud to help establish strategic long-term leadership in these critical, next-generation semiconductor technologies," said Coherent. ”
"The use of silicon carbide, in addition to meeting the requirements of the Department of Defense for high-voltage, high-power applications and systems, will significantly improve hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), multi-electric aircraft (MEA) components, directed energy, naval ship power systems and all-electric ships, silicon carbide power electronics due to artificial intelligence (AI)," said another head of the company. Energy efficiency improvements in data centers and traditional hyperscale data centers, especially for data centers, will be addressed, where power consumption is growing rapidly due to the explosive demand for data and compute-intensive workloads from artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining.
In addition to silicon carbide, the next generation of semiconductor super-single crystal diamond is expected to surpass the performance of silicon carbide and greatly expand the application fields of quantum computing, quantum encryption and quantum sensing. ”
In addition to the news, we also recently watched the news of the establishment of the Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance (SCIA) at the University of Pennsylvania, where Joshua Robinson, professor of materials science and engineering and director of SCIA, said:
"SiC is a key semiconductor for the energy transition, as it is at the heart of several next-generation 'green' technologies," said Joshua Robinson. "SiC is used in high-power devices, it enables smaller devices to handle higher power and provide charging faster, which is exactly what we need if we are to build a high-speed charging network for electric vehicles across the country.
Twenty years ago, there was significant progress in academic research on SiC crystal growth in the United States and the production of materials for the Department of Defense, but in recent years we have observed that university education and research in this field in the United States are declining, despite the rapid expansion of the current market application space. We have an obligation to bring SiC crystal growth and processing research back to the U.S."
Joshua Robinson also highlighted the consortium's funding from an $8 million grant from the Silicon Carbide Crystal Center (SiC3) established in conjunction with onsemi, as well as the U.S. Air Force's critical support for the establishment of SCIA through the Defense University Research Instrument Program (DURIP) award.
Source: Silicon Carbide Core Observation
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