SiC vs. Si - Evaluation of Potentials for Performance Improvement of Power Electronics Converter Systems by SiC Power Semiconductors

Switching devices based on wide band gap materials as SiC offer a significant performance improvement on the switch level compared to Si devices. A well known example are SiC diodes employed e.g. in PFC converters. In this paper, the impact on the system level performance, i.e. efficiency/power density, of a PFC and of a DC-DC converter resulting with the new SiC devices is evaluated based on analytical optimisation procedures and prototype systems. There, normally-on JFETs by SiCED and normally-off JFETs by SemiSouth are considered.