Application

with varying frequency and energy saving, IGBT is playing a key role in electric vehicles

IGBT is a must in future life

Crowned the CPU or electricity electronic, the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) is a semiconductor power switch component composed of a BJT (bipolar junction transistor) and MOSFET (metal oxide semi-field effect transistor) featuring high input impendence, high voltage resistance, and low turn on voltage drop.

Regarding household application, IGBT is required by inverter air conditioning for even better energy savings. Featuring low turn on voltage drop, it improves the efficiency of fuel in electronic ignition systems.
Thanks to rising electric vehicles and scooters, the IGBT is becoming the focus of industry development in the future. One electric vehicle needs up to one hundred IGBTs which is seven to ten times more than its conventional counterparts. Regarding industrial applications, it can be found in AC servo motor, inverter, wind, solar, and other green power generation. Regarding high voltage applications, IGBT is seen in high speed and other railways, as well as on the grid.

A major gap in the wafer industry supply chain: the back-end process of IGBT

With such a good future and development potential, why are there no Taiwanese suppliers found in the global IGBT markets in spite of the mature IC design and manufacturing capacity they possess?
The key challenge lies in the dominance of IGBT's back-end process technology by very few IDM players. In the early years of IGBT products, they were made by integrated IDM approach. Thanks to the trend of light wafer or fabless, leading global IDM semiconductor makers replaced their in-house production with outsourcing even in the face of huge IGBT demands. The front-end process of IGBT OEM may be satisfied by existing foundries but not back-end ones. This makes the critical back-end process of IGBT manufacturing (the backside process) the bottleneck and gap in the industry supply chain.

The back-end process of IGBT covers wafer thinning, multiple ion implantation, laser annealing, backside metal sputtering, and an extra gas annealing by some manufacturers. Compared with the backside thinning and evaporation deposition required by the conventional MOSFET backside process, it is not only a high order but also a missing part in certain conventional front-end OEMs. This strips IGBT design houses from making their designs by OEMs, which, in turn, results in an IGBT market dominant by few players.

Stepping into the IGBT supply chain by leaving the back-end process to ProPowertek