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Led by Tesla, EVs drive chip industry's shift beyond silicon

182 points by Corrado 5y ago

Corrado 5y ago
I didn't even think about non-silicon based chips being viable, let alone more efficient. The article mentions that SiC (Silicon Carbide) chips can be 50% more efficient. Diamond based chips can reduce energy loss by one-50,000th of that of Silicon chips. If we can get these chips manufactured at a reasonable cost it would really help EVs get longer range. And it might even give us multi-day use out of our smart devices (phones, watches, etc.)
- Traster 5y ago
  As far as I understand it, these SiC chips are things like discrete MOSFETs designed to work at hundreds of volts and handle huge power running through them. I think the likelihood of this scaling down to millivolts is quite unlikely. The more likely applications for this are power stations and hooked up to solar power plants rather than in your iPhone I would expect.
  - pwr-electronics 5y ago
    You're correct that SiC is for medium to high voltage. But there's also GaN, which is for low to medium voltage, and already works in the millivolt range. Both GaN and SiC will have wider ranges in the future as the technology continues to improve.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Silicon Carbide is extensively used in Power Electronics. It's just that there is a very small group of people that are having to deal with kilovolts on a daily basis, so I suppose it is not perhaps widely known.
  - dtgriscom 5y ago
    For some strange reason, my high school had a subscription to the EPRI journal [1]. For this budding nerd, reading about SCRs the size of hockey pucks, with optical fiber triggering, was quite entertaining. [1]: https://eprijournal.com/ https://eprijournal.com/
- u320 5y ago
  All EVs are already highly efficient, any further increases is going to be extremely marginal.
  - sensitive-ears 5y ago
    There is still plenty to be gained from squeezing that last 1% out. Tesla is probably cell limited right now, so if your car is 1pct more efficient you can pull less cells in it and mthen make 1pct more vehicles.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    EVs tend to be efficient at high power. They can be 94-98 percent efficient at 100kW but normal driving is something like 4kW at 45mph. If you reduce loads by 40 to 50 watts, you can gain a mile of range. With inverter losses in the 1-2 kilowatt range at high power there is room for improvement.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    For pure range, sure. But think about things like heat sinks or other cooling devices. Or the weight of these components themselves. Swap over to this new SiC, you get more direct efficiency, AND you don't need to carry as much supporting hardware!
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  > If we can get these chips manufactured at a reasonable cost it would really help EVs get longer range. How much longer though? The motors that move the wheels consume way more energy than the microchips on board the car. Even when a car is standing still, the AC or the heating system are also quite energy-hungry compared to a few CPUs.
  - bad_alloc 5y ago
    Yeah but in most EVs you need to transform the battery DC current to AC for the motor.
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      I was under the impression the Model 3 uses permanent magnet DC motors, with the increased efficiency accounting for some of the range gains.
      - vardump 5y ago
        No electric motors are really DC driven. They do differ how the AC is derived, though, mechanically or electrically.
        fennecfoxen 5y ago
        To say a word about the physics: The fundamental force at play is the electromagnetic force. If you run a current in a coil in the magnetic field, it will rotate so that the coil’s field comes into alignment with the outer field. Once it’s there it is happy to stay. You’ve got to change something to get the motor running continuously. AC is quite clever about it because it just changes the field electrically and this is much more reliable than changing it with moving parts.
        tzs 5y ago
        I've got an idea for a DC electric motor that has no apparent AC. Can anyone spot any hidden AC here? Take a disk on a shaft. Use a ratcheting mechanism on the shaft so that it can only rotate in one direction. Attach permanent magnets around the rim of the disk. Attach more permanent magnets to bimetallic strips positioned outside the rim of the disk. Near each bimetallic strip place a resistor. The angular spacing of the bimetallic strips and magnets around the outside of the rim should not be that same as that of the magnets on the rim. Turn the disk by moving one or more of the outer magnets closer to the rim to create asymmetrical torque on the disk. You move the outer magnets by using the resistors to heat the their bimetallic strips. You move an out magnet back to its original position by letting it cool back down.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > And it might even give us multi-day use out of our smart devices (phones, watches, etc.) Not going to happen, they'll just find a way to use more power instead. You probably noticed that for years now, phones and the like have had a fixed battery lifetime of about a day of medium use, even though battery and chip technologies have improved. I'll admit that in terms of efficiency - performance per watt - things have increased, but the goal of the phone manufacturers is not to make things last longer, it's to min/max and find a balance between battery life and power. With current day technology you can easily make a phone that lasts for a month on a single charge, but it'd be bulky compared to what you can do with it.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Once we all own nothing and are happy though, perhaps it will be in the phone company's interest to make their phones last longer so they can get more rental income off one asset.
  - Corrado 5y ago
    Yes, you're probably right. For proof we just need to look at RAM & CPU requirements for most software. As both of those components increased, the software grew to consume them. sigh one can wish, can't one?
- li2uR3ce 5y ago
  > And it might even give us multi-day use out of our smart devices I don't think you understand how software development works. Q: How much hardware do you need? A: How much you got? The latest generation only gets the battery longevity because software developers still have to support the previous generation. As soon as enough e-waste happens, the gains disappear. I might be a cynic but there sure seems to be a lot of empirical data to support my disorder.
- xondono 5y ago
  SiC is not a good fit for anything under ~100-200V, it's just not what it is designed for. GaN makes more sense for consumer electronics, that's why it's popping up in a lot of devices, even if prices right now are too "high end" for most users. As for phones, watches, etc..: 1- These technologies won't be as dense as standard silicon for quite some time (if ever. 2- We've had big swings in both efficiency and battery capacity several times already, but it works in the same way internet speed works. Power-hungry features grow with increased efficiency in the same way websites grow in size with increased internet bandwidth.
- eutectic 5y ago
  Presumably you mean to rather than by?
Koraza 5y ago
Wow. EVs future looks exciting!
Koiwai 5y ago
I'd like to point out this is not about increased range, for example, if the ECU already works at 95% efficiency, that's not a very high number for brushless ECU, just for example, so 5% of energy is wasted, if we can reduce that in half, the efficiency will only increase to 97.5%, that's a very small improvement on range. BUT, now the ECU only needs to dissipate half wasted heat, this could be a big net win. A more close to everyday life example would be chargers for notebooks, we now have smaller chargers thanks to GaN FETs, SiC is like GaN.
- engie 5y ago
  This is the key observation - hitting breakpoints in efficiency that let us remove active cooling, silicon area or heatsinks reduce weight, cost & complexity.
  - taneq 5y ago
    Yep. High efficiency is also the key to the crazy high performance we see in high end EVs these days. Going from 96% to 98% drivetrain efficiency only gives you 2% more battery life but it doubles your power output.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  This isn't quite right... In a car which can accelerate up to speed and brake again every 30 seconds while going through a city with a lot of stop lines, the efficiency of the power components really matters. If you loose 5% in the motors, 5% in the power electronics and 5% in the battery in each direction, then each accelerate-brake cycle is losing you ~30% of the energy you started with. At town speeds, friction and air resistance losses are tiny, so that 30% is probably actually most of the energy you are using! Add that to the fact that certain motor control techniques such as field weakening involve every Amp of real power that comes from the battery passing many times though the inverter, since there is a higher circulating current between inverter and motor coils.
  - Koiwai 5y ago
    > If you loose 5% in the motors, 5% in the power electronics and 5% in the battery You realize SiC is not the savior for all your problems right? I'm not saying efficiency doesn't matter, I'm saying this is not gonna improve range significantly, there is a difference.
ricardobeat 5y ago
https://archive.is/pRgwN https://archive.is/pRgwN
mrpopo 5y ago
No point gaining a few points in efficiency if the cars themselves keep getting bigger and bulkier.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It's the irony of the push for more efficiency. In theory you could have the equivalent of a 90's PC now with a fraction of the power consumption, but in practice any gain is used to create more powerful chips and do more calculations. There's a saying that was more about financial budgets, but tl;dr expenses will fill up the budget. In my country there's irony as well. On the one side, power companies and the government invest a lot in green power production, offshore windmill farms and solar farms and the like. But at the same time, companies like Microsoft and Google come in and have datacenters built that use up all the energy that those 'green' alternatives produce. We would've been carbon neutral years ago if it wasn't for the increase in power consumption that follows production.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    It's another face of the same effect that causes the Jevon's paradox. At some point it stops and further efficiency leads to less consumption, but there's nothing that says that point is achievable.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      With computers it did. Everybody had a PC that used hundreds of watts, now much of that is running on 4 watt phones or 80 watt laptops.
      - mrpopo 5y ago
        The main power consumption of electronics is the embodied energy (energy used to build the device), and the number of devices per person has kept increasing worldwide (24 per household in the US! https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/02/24-electronic-products-per-household-got-recycling/?sh=76b7a4242c2e https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/02/24-electroni...)
baybal2 5y ago
There is not much they can show to really lead besides switching to superior switches. I admit Tesla's inverter design is very conservative, but it's very thorough engineering.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  I'm really surprised you don't see the inverter and the motors closer coupled in Tesla's designs. For example, by having MOSFETs spliced into the wire wound onto the stator. That minimises wire length (and therefore resistance). The heavy motor windings are a great heatsink for brief acceleration, and both will need liquid cooling for prolonged 100 mph driving up a hill.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    Almost all high power switches are made to be soldered directly to cables.
- madengr 5y ago
  The article mentions GaN not widely used because it is integrated with Si. Cree’s process is GaN on SiC, so you’d get better heat dissipation than in Si, but it costs more. There are also done processes integrating a diamond heat spreader under the GaN channel.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    @madengr it seems you were secretly banned (shadowbanned) https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5 https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5
    - grzm 5y ago
      There's nothing secret about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23559004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23559004
- baybal2 5y ago
  @madengr it seems you were secretly banned (shadowbanned) https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5 https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5
imglorp 5y ago
I think the comments might be missing the bigger picture. It might be a few percent improvement dissipation or range: minimal impact to you, say 2 watts per car. But if they are shipping 800k cars per year that's 1.6 MW off the global power consumption for those new cars.
- qayxc 5y ago
  You're using the wrong units. 1.6MW global power consumption has no meaning on its own. 1.6MW is the power that two sports cars can generate. Power consumption (e.g. energy) requires time, so 2W per car at 2 hours of daily use would be 4Wh per car per day or about 1460Wh per year per car or 1168MWh for 800k cars. That's the electricity consumption of ~106 average US households [0]. I think that gives a much better picture of the amount of energy you're talking here. [0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    > 1.6MW is the power that two sports cars can generate If by "sports cars" you mean Bugatti Veyrons, then sure. For more "normal" sports cars, you'd need a bit more than 2.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      Only if you completely ignore the tune-up and car modding scene. On the BMW side we have the G-Power G6M V10 Hurricane CS (based on the M6 Coupé), for Mercedes there's the Mansory Black Edition (based on the Mercedes S-class/S 63 AMG), Underground Racing uses the Audi R8 V10 TT for its 1500 HP machine, the Porsche 911 has a 9ff F 97 A-Max incarnation with about 1400HP and the 9ff GT9 V-Max. The 9ff GTurbo comes in at a mere 1200HP, based on the 911 GT3 and there's more. So no, in the car enthusiast scene even 1MW is is not uncommon. And that's not using Lamborghinis or Bugattis. You'd be surprised how many street legal modded M3s, S-class and 911 have 800kW or more max power (at least in Europe). Edit: shame on me - I forgot the Tesla Model S Plaid. Those have straight up 750kW electric power trains, too.
  - 5y ago
ndm000 5y ago
Is there a market for SiC chips in cloud data centers? I’m unfamiliar with the space, but 50% efficiency gains (if costs can be kept comparable) could be a game changer.
- MertsA 5y ago
  It's worth noting that there's also gallium nitride to consider and while it isn't as good as silicon carbide in high temperature applications or areas needing higher thermal conductivity it's better than silicon carbide as far as breakdown voltage and low resistance are concerned. Maybe eventually we'll see GaN in server power supplies and SiC in VFDs for fans, cooling, and DC infrastructure. There might even be a justification to use SiC solid state transformers to bridge between utility power, generators, battery banks, etc. It's very important to note that 50% efficiency gains might not be as huge as it sounds given that we're just talking about losses in MOSFETs. This isn't going to be turned into your next CPU or show the same kinds of efficiency gains in logic circuits.
hristov 5y ago
Good article, but very Japanese centered. This of course is understandable, as it is coming from Nikkei. There has been a lot of news about how the US is giving up leadership in semiconductors to Asia, but the US has actually been holding our own in Silicon Carbide. A US company called Cree, through their division Wolfspeed is the leader in manufacturing silicon carbide wafers. AFAIK, they are still making the most wafers in the world. There is another little known US company, ON semiconductor, that is arguably the leader in auto grade silicon carbide chips. They were not the first to make the sic mosfet, but they were the first to make sic mosfets that are qualified for use in cars. On Semi had acquired the legendary Fairchild semiconductor which had a lot of expertise in high voltage high power applications for auto and industrial. This probably helped commercialize silicon carbide. This is arguable of course, but ON semiconductor insist that they make the highest performance automobile grade SiC chips on the market. To see how fast this technology is moving, you can watch this video [1] where sandy munro needs a helper to wrestle with the ford mach-e inverter on a table. And then you can see this video [2] where the CEO of ON semi, holds two inverters for a car and an suv in each hand effortlessly. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=1086s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=1086s, see around minute 15. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq0kDzyPZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq0kDzyPZY - see about minute 46.
- CSSer 5y ago
  I am far from a subject matter expert on this, but I have been doing my best to read up on this lately. It seems like we’re globally diverging on fabrication expertise at a process level i.e. nanometer scale [0]. The bulk of leading edge chip manufacturing (currently around 7nm or below) seems to indeed be slipping away to Southeast Asia, but as you said the U.S. is holding their own at larger process levels (Cree is mentioned in the article as well) and still producing at a volume that may be surprising to many doomsayers. It’s worth noting at this point that, according to the article I linked below, it is estimated that five larger process chips are required for every leading process chip produced. So this doesn’t seem to entirely be an accident on the part of U.S. companies. Sure, some companies like Intel have simply failed to innovate in the past few years, but others seem to have made a calculated decision to avoid massive R&D expenditures that may or may not pay off as we begin to approach the limits of Moore’s law. The reality is that leading edge chip fabs are extraordinarily expensive. I read a podcast transcript recently with a prominent professor who is an expert in this field [1]. He mentioned that he did some consulting for the U.S. Govt., and when they asked him for his estimate for how much it would cost in subsidies to catch up with or outpace the rest of the world in fabs his response made the guy who asked the question practically fall out of his chair. Have we reached a point where quantity (at an average level of quality) is now more important than having the fastest and the smallest IP? [0]: https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-chip-manufacturing/ https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-c... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-shortage-tsmc-samsung-ps5-decoder-interview https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-...
quanto 5y ago
The article doesn't pass the smell test for me. Claim 1. Smaller SiC inverters enabled Tesla to implement sports-car-like streamlined design. Traditional Si inverters are not that big. Certainly not big enough to single-handedly change the car design [1] Claim 2. Hyundai will use SiC chips to increase its typical EV range by 5%. The article claims that SiC will reduce wasted energy by half (or more). If we go by this figure, Hyundai's EVs need to waste 10% of its energy on Si chips. This seems quite high to me. No doubt there are losses in the motor, power electronics, and battery, but losing 10% of the EV's total energy on Si based chips seems incredibly inefficient to start with. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=909s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=909s
- tuatoru 5y ago
  > If we go by this figure, Hyundai's EVs need to waste 10% of its energy on Si chips. Most of it is not lost in the silicon, but in the interconnects (wiring and connectors) and motor(s). SiC is better (more robust) than Si with high voltage, high current, and/or high temperature. Specifically, kilovolt-level, kiloamp-level, and temperatures above 150 celsius. If you double your battery voltage from 400V (current standard) to 800V, you halve your resistive losses in the "wires" for the same electrical power demanded. Silicon MOSFETS that can withstand a kilovolt and a kiloamp are very big and very expensive. You get more power delivered for the same power leaving the battery. Size: SiC's very high thermal conductivity means less of a margin of safety for secondary breakdown. SiC tolerates higher current density (amps/square mm) than Si, so smaller devices are possible, saving mass. Its temperature stability allows it to be sintered to the package heatsink--further improving heat removal. Tolerance for high temperatures means you need less mass and volume for heat dissipation structures. Other efficiencies: With very high currents (kiloamp) and medium frequency switching, SiC IGBTs provide more benefits, because rather than being directly proportional to current as with MOSFETs, losses are proportional to the log of current. Alternatively, doubling the battery voltage again to 1.5kV (and so halving the currents) might allow Hyundai to use more aluminium for the "wires", with a cost saving over copper.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Why is SiC a good thing? 1. It has a higher bandgap energy than silicon, which means it can tolerate more heat without breaking down. It also means the junctions can be physically smaller. 2. Smaller junctions mean the transistors can switch faster, which means less time spent in the linear region, which means they generate less waste heat than silicon transistors. 3. SiC also has lower ON resistance, which means less waste heat still. 4. SiC conducts heat better than silicon, so removing its [lesser] waste heat is easier and requires a smaller heat sink apparatus. All of this makes SiC a fantastic technology for power electronics. (It's less important for signal electronics, but even signal electronics waste small amounts of power so reducing that further is still relevant.) For EVs, SiC inverters mean less mass for an EV to carry around. Less mass per se doesn't matter as much as you might think for an EV because with regenerative braking you get back some of your acceleration energy when you decelerate. However, air resistance matters enormously in an EV because you can't get back the energy you lost pushing the car through the air. And "less mass" also means "smaller" and "smaller" means "more opportunities to make the car aerodynamically efficient."
- sonium 5y ago
  Thank you for answering everything I ever wondered about SiC. Are there any other semiconductors that would be even better than SiC in all four points?
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    Diamond is even better in terms of bandgap and thermal conductivity (one way jewelers verify a diamond is real is by checking to see if the gem has ridiculously high thermal conductivity). But diamond semiconductors are much too expensive ATM. Gallium Nitride is the closest competitor to SiC now; it's better than SiC for high frequency applications but worse for high temperature applications and GaN is somewhat harder to manufacture. But that's changing rapidly. https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/silicon-carbide-and-gallium-nitride-compared https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/silico...
    - 5y ago
xyzzy21 5y ago
So wrong! Non-silicon is 10x-100x more expensive and 10x-100x less fit for most applications. Non-silicon (aka compound semiconductors) are only 1% of all semiconductor revenue and volume. Switching from majority semiconductor to tiny minority semiconductor is NOT going to solve any supply problems!! SiC and GaN are STILL made on silicon and most of the circuitry is still silicon. Only the power transistors are using non-silicon. Mostly a nonsense article.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  So obvious you didn't read the article.
tardismechanic 5y ago
> but electric vehicles are helping chip away at its dominance in the pursuit of energy efficiency. I suspect the authors did not intend that pun ("chip away", get it ;-) ) Is there a name for such unintentional puns?
tus89 5y ago
Thanks God the beaches are running out of sand!
Animats 5y ago
Active work has been going on in this area for years, for really high power applications.[1] Locomotives. Power substations. Wind turbines. At the low end, silicon carbide gates have been used for wall wart power supplies, in low volume. Looks like it's finally making it into automotive, which makes sense. [1] https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/high_megawatt/Approved-Raju-DoE_NIST_HMW_VSD_GE_raju.pdf https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/high_megawat...
- MertsA 5y ago
  >Applications for HV SiC >Data center distribution - MV AC or DC to the rack, (13.8kV distribution to match gensets What the hell are they smoking? MV to the row, maybe, but are they seriously proposing MV terminating to a power supply in every rack??? That seems like it'd be an installation and maintenance nightmare. I feel like it'd be much more sensible to at least limit in-rack power to 480V max. Stick with something that doesn't require DC techs to use a hot stick to plug in a new rack.

182 points by Corrado 5y ago

I didn't even think about non-silicon based chips being viable, let alone more efficient. The article mentions that SiC (Silicon Carbide) chips can be 50% more efficient. Diamond based chips can reduce energy loss by one-50,000th of that of Silicon chips. If we can get these chips manufactured at a reasonable cost it would really help EVs get longer range. And it might even give us multi-day use out of our smart devices (phones, watches, etc.)

Traster 5y ago
As far as I understand it, these SiC chips are things like discrete MOSFETs designed to work at hundreds of volts and handle huge power running through them. I think the likelihood of this scaling down to millivolts is quite unlikely. The more likely applications for this are power stations and hooked up to solar power plants rather than in your iPhone I would expect.
- pwr-electronics 5y ago
  You're correct that SiC is for medium to high voltage. But there's also GaN, which is for low to medium voltage, and already works in the millivolt range. Both GaN and SiC will have wider ranges in the future as the technology continues to improve.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
Silicon Carbide is extensively used in Power Electronics. It's just that there is a very small group of people that are having to deal with kilovolts on a daily basis, so I suppose it is not perhaps widely known.
- dtgriscom 5y ago
  For some strange reason, my high school had a subscription to the EPRI journal [1]. For this budding nerd, reading about SCRs the size of hockey pucks, with optical fiber triggering, was quite entertaining. [1]: https://eprijournal.com/ https://eprijournal.com/
u320 5y ago
All EVs are already highly efficient, any further increases is going to be extremely marginal.
- sensitive-ears 5y ago
  There is still plenty to be gained from squeezing that last 1% out. Tesla is probably cell limited right now, so if your car is 1pct more efficient you can pull less cells in it and mthen make 1pct more vehicles.
- phkahler 5y ago
  EVs tend to be efficient at high power. They can be 94-98 percent efficient at 100kW but normal driving is something like 4kW at 45mph. If you reduce loads by 40 to 50 watts, you can gain a mile of range. With inverter losses in the 1-2 kilowatt range at high power there is room for improvement.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  For pure range, sure. But think about things like heat sinks or other cooling devices. Or the weight of these components themselves. Swap over to this new SiC, you get more direct efficiency, AND you don't need to carry as much supporting hardware!
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
> If we can get these chips manufactured at a reasonable cost it would really help EVs get longer range. How much longer though? The motors that move the wheels consume way more energy than the microchips on board the car. Even when a car is standing still, the AC or the heating system are also quite energy-hungry compared to a few CPUs.
- bad_alloc 5y ago
  Yeah but in most EVs you need to transform the battery DC current to AC for the motor.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    I was under the impression the Model 3 uses permanent magnet DC motors, with the increased efficiency accounting for some of the range gains.
    - vardump 5y ago
      No electric motors are really DC driven. They do differ how the AC is derived, though, mechanically or electrically.
      - fennecfoxen 5y ago
        To say a word about the physics: The fundamental force at play is the electromagnetic force. If you run a current in a coil in the magnetic field, it will rotate so that the coil’s field comes into alignment with the outer field. Once it’s there it is happy to stay. You’ve got to change something to get the motor running continuously. AC is quite clever about it because it just changes the field electrically and this is much more reliable than changing it with moving parts.
      - tzs 5y ago
        I've got an idea for a DC electric motor that has no apparent AC. Can anyone spot any hidden AC here? Take a disk on a shaft. Use a ratcheting mechanism on the shaft so that it can only rotate in one direction. Attach permanent magnets around the rim of the disk. Attach more permanent magnets to bimetallic strips positioned outside the rim of the disk. Near each bimetallic strip place a resistor. The angular spacing of the bimetallic strips and magnets around the outside of the rim should not be that same as that of the magnets on the rim. Turn the disk by moving one or more of the outer magnets closer to the rim to create asymmetrical torque on the disk. You move the outer magnets by using the resistors to heat the their bimetallic strips. You move an out magnet back to its original position by letting it cool back down.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> And it might even give us multi-day use out of our smart devices (phones, watches, etc.) Not going to happen, they'll just find a way to use more power instead. You probably noticed that for years now, phones and the like have had a fixed battery lifetime of about a day of medium use, even though battery and chip technologies have improved. I'll admit that in terms of efficiency - performance per watt - things have increased, but the goal of the phone manufacturers is not to make things last longer, it's to min/max and find a balance between battery life and power. With current day technology you can easily make a phone that lasts for a month on a single charge, but it'd be bulky compared to what you can do with it.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Once we all own nothing and are happy though, perhaps it will be in the phone company's interest to make their phones last longer so they can get more rental income off one asset.
- Corrado 5y ago
  Yes, you're probably right. For proof we just need to look at RAM & CPU requirements for most software. As both of those components increased, the software grew to consume them. sigh one can wish, can't one?
li2uR3ce 5y ago
> And it might even give us multi-day use out of our smart devices I don't think you understand how software development works. Q: How much hardware do you need? A: How much you got? The latest generation only gets the battery longevity because software developers still have to support the previous generation. As soon as enough e-waste happens, the gains disappear. I might be a cynic but there sure seems to be a lot of empirical data to support my disorder.
xondono 5y ago
SiC is not a good fit for anything under ~100-200V, it's just not what it is designed for. GaN makes more sense for consumer electronics, that's why it's popping up in a lot of devices, even if prices right now are too "high end" for most users. As for phones, watches, etc..: 1- These technologies won't be as dense as standard silicon for quite some time (if ever. 2- We've had big swings in both efficiency and battery capacity several times already, but it works in the same way internet speed works. Power-hungry features grow with increased efficiency in the same way websites grow in size with increased internet bandwidth.
eutectic 5y ago
Presumably you mean to rather than by?

Koraza 5y ago

Wow. EVs future looks exciting!

Koiwai 5y ago

I'd like to point out this is not about increased range, for example, if the ECU already works at 95% efficiency, that's not a very high number for brushless ECU, just for example, so 5% of energy is wasted, if we can reduce that in half, the efficiency will only increase to 97.5%, that's a very small improvement on range. BUT, now the ECU only needs to dissipate half wasted heat, this could be a big net win. A more close to everyday life example would be chargers for notebooks, we now have smaller chargers thanks to GaN FETs, SiC is like GaN.

engie 5y ago
This is the key observation - hitting breakpoints in efficiency that let us remove active cooling, silicon area or heatsinks reduce weight, cost & complexity.
- taneq 5y ago
  Yep. High efficiency is also the key to the crazy high performance we see in high end EVs these days. Going from 96% to 98% drivetrain efficiency only gives you 2% more battery life but it doubles your power output.
londons_explore 5y ago
This isn't quite right... In a car which can accelerate up to speed and brake again every 30 seconds while going through a city with a lot of stop lines, the efficiency of the power components really matters. If you loose 5% in the motors, 5% in the power electronics and 5% in the battery in each direction, then each accelerate-brake cycle is losing you ~30% of the energy you started with. At town speeds, friction and air resistance losses are tiny, so that 30% is probably actually most of the energy you are using! Add that to the fact that certain motor control techniques such as field weakening involve every Amp of real power that comes from the battery passing many times though the inverter, since there is a higher circulating current between inverter and motor coils.
- Koiwai 5y ago
  > If you loose 5% in the motors, 5% in the power electronics and 5% in the battery You realize SiC is not the savior for all your problems right? I'm not saying efficiency doesn't matter, I'm saying this is not gonna improve range significantly, there is a difference.

ricardobeat 5y ago

https://archive.is/pRgwN https://archive.is/pRgwN

mrpopo 5y ago

No point gaining a few points in efficiency if the cars themselves keep getting bigger and bulkier.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It's the irony of the push for more efficiency. In theory you could have the equivalent of a 90's PC now with a fraction of the power consumption, but in practice any gain is used to create more powerful chips and do more calculations. There's a saying that was more about financial budgets, but tl;dr expenses will fill up the budget. In my country there's irony as well. On the one side, power companies and the government invest a lot in green power production, offshore windmill farms and solar farms and the like. But at the same time, companies like Microsoft and Google come in and have datacenters built that use up all the energy that those 'green' alternatives produce. We would've been carbon neutral years ago if it wasn't for the increase in power consumption that follows production.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  It's another face of the same effect that causes the Jevon's paradox. At some point it stops and further efficiency leads to less consumption, but there's nothing that says that point is achievable.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    With computers it did. Everybody had a PC that used hundreds of watts, now much of that is running on 4 watt phones or 80 watt laptops.
    - mrpopo 5y ago
      The main power consumption of electronics is the embodied energy (energy used to build the device), and the number of devices per person has kept increasing worldwide (24 per household in the US! https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/02/24-electronic-products-per-household-got-recycling/?sh=76b7a4242c2e https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/02/24-electroni...)

baybal2 5y ago

There is not much they can show to really lead besides switching to superior switches. I admit Tesla's inverter design is very conservative, but it's very thorough engineering.

londons_explore 5y ago
I'm really surprised you don't see the inverter and the motors closer coupled in Tesla's designs. For example, by having MOSFETs spliced into the wire wound onto the stator. That minimises wire length (and therefore resistance). The heavy motor windings are a great heatsink for brief acceleration, and both will need liquid cooling for prolonged 100 mph driving up a hill.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Almost all high power switches are made to be soldered directly to cables.
madengr 5y ago
The article mentions GaN not widely used because it is integrated with Si. Cree’s process is GaN on SiC, so you’d get better heat dissipation than in Si, but it costs more. There are also done processes integrating a diamond heat spreader under the GaN channel.
- baybal2 5y ago
  @madengr it seems you were secretly banned (shadowbanned) https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5 https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5
  - grzm 5y ago
    There's nothing secret about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23559004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23559004
baybal2 5y ago
@madengr it seems you were secretly banned (shadowbanned) https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5 https://ibb.co/NK6Yhj5

imglorp 5y ago

I think the comments might be missing the bigger picture. It might be a few percent improvement dissipation or range: minimal impact to you, say 2 watts per car. But if they are shipping 800k cars per year that's 1.6 MW off the global power consumption for those new cars.

qayxc 5y ago
You're using the wrong units. 1.6MW global power consumption has no meaning on its own. 1.6MW is the power that two sports cars can generate. Power consumption (e.g. energy) requires time, so 2W per car at 2 hours of daily use would be 4Wh per car per day or about 1460Wh per year per car or 1168MWh for 800k cars. That's the electricity consumption of ~106 average US households [0]. I think that gives a much better picture of the amount of energy you're talking here. [0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
- josephcsible 5y ago
  > 1.6MW is the power that two sports cars can generate If by "sports cars" you mean Bugatti Veyrons, then sure. For more "normal" sports cars, you'd need a bit more than 2.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    Only if you completely ignore the tune-up and car modding scene. On the BMW side we have the G-Power G6M V10 Hurricane CS (based on the M6 Coupé), for Mercedes there's the Mansory Black Edition (based on the Mercedes S-class/S 63 AMG), Underground Racing uses the Audi R8 V10 TT for its 1500 HP machine, the Porsche 911 has a 9ff F 97 A-Max incarnation with about 1400HP and the 9ff GT9 V-Max. The 9ff GTurbo comes in at a mere 1200HP, based on the 911 GT3 and there's more. So no, in the car enthusiast scene even 1MW is is not uncommon. And that's not using Lamborghinis or Bugattis. You'd be surprised how many street legal modded M3s, S-class and 911 have 800kW or more max power (at least in Europe). Edit: shame on me - I forgot the Tesla Model S Plaid. Those have straight up 750kW electric power trains, too.
- 5y ago

ndm000 5y ago

Is there a market for SiC chips in cloud data centers? I’m unfamiliar with the space, but 50% efficiency gains (if costs can be kept comparable) could be a game changer.

MertsA 5y ago
It's worth noting that there's also gallium nitride to consider and while it isn't as good as silicon carbide in high temperature applications or areas needing higher thermal conductivity it's better than silicon carbide as far as breakdown voltage and low resistance are concerned. Maybe eventually we'll see GaN in server power supplies and SiC in VFDs for fans, cooling, and DC infrastructure. There might even be a justification to use SiC solid state transformers to bridge between utility power, generators, battery banks, etc. It's very important to note that 50% efficiency gains might not be as huge as it sounds given that we're just talking about losses in MOSFETs. This isn't going to be turned into your next CPU or show the same kinds of efficiency gains in logic circuits.

hristov 5y ago

Good article, but very Japanese centered. This of course is understandable, as it is coming from Nikkei. There has been a lot of news about how the US is giving up leadership in semiconductors to Asia, but the US has actually been holding our own in Silicon Carbide. A US company called Cree, through their division Wolfspeed is the leader in manufacturing silicon carbide wafers. AFAIK, they are still making the most wafers in the world. There is another little known US company, ON semiconductor, that is arguably the leader in auto grade silicon carbide chips. They were not the first to make the sic mosfet, but they were the first to make sic mosfets that are qualified for use in cars. On Semi had acquired the legendary Fairchild semiconductor which had a lot of expertise in high voltage high power applications for auto and industrial. This probably helped commercialize silicon carbide. This is arguable of course, but ON semiconductor insist that they make the highest performance automobile grade SiC chips on the market. To see how fast this technology is moving, you can watch this video [1] where sandy munro needs a helper to wrestle with the ford mach-e inverter on a table. And then you can see this video [2] where the CEO of ON semi, holds two inverters for a car and an suv in each hand effortlessly. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=1086s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=1086s, see around minute 15. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq0kDzyPZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfq0kDzyPZY - see about minute 46.

CSSer 5y ago
I am far from a subject matter expert on this, but I have been doing my best to read up on this lately. It seems like we’re globally diverging on fabrication expertise at a process level i.e. nanometer scale [0]. The bulk of leading edge chip manufacturing (currently around 7nm or below) seems to indeed be slipping away to Southeast Asia, but as you said the U.S. is holding their own at larger process levels (Cree is mentioned in the article as well) and still producing at a volume that may be surprising to many doomsayers. It’s worth noting at this point that, according to the article I linked below, it is estimated that five larger process chips are required for every leading process chip produced. So this doesn’t seem to entirely be an accident on the part of U.S. companies. Sure, some companies like Intel have simply failed to innovate in the past few years, but others seem to have made a calculated decision to avoid massive R&D expenditures that may or may not pay off as we begin to approach the limits of Moore’s law. The reality is that leading edge chip fabs are extraordinarily expensive. I read a podcast transcript recently with a prominent professor who is an expert in this field [1]. He mentioned that he did some consulting for the U.S. Govt., and when they asked him for his estimate for how much it would cost in subsidies to catch up with or outpace the rest of the world in fabs his response made the guy who asked the question practically fall out of his chair. Have we reached a point where quantity (at an average level of quality) is now more important than having the fastest and the smallest IP? [0]: https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-chip-manufacturing/ https://semiengineering.com/can-the-u-s-regain-its-edge-in-c... [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-shortage-tsmc-samsung-ps5-decoder-interview https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22648372/willy-shih-chip-...

quanto 5y ago

The article doesn't pass the smell test for me. Claim 1. Smaller SiC inverters enabled Tesla to implement sports-car-like streamlined design. Traditional Si inverters are not that big. Certainly not big enough to single-handedly change the car design [1] Claim 2. Hyundai will use SiC chips to increase its typical EV range by 5%. The article claims that SiC will reduce wasted energy by half (or more). If we go by this figure, Hyundai's EVs need to waste 10% of its energy on Si chips. This seems quite high to me. No doubt there are losses in the motor, power electronics, and battery, but losing 10% of the EV's total energy on Si based chips seems incredibly inefficient to start with. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=909s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHVV52lPyIs&t=909s

tuatoru 5y ago
> If we go by this figure, Hyundai's EVs need to waste 10% of its energy on Si chips. Most of it is not lost in the silicon, but in the interconnects (wiring and connectors) and motor(s). SiC is better (more robust) than Si with high voltage, high current, and/or high temperature. Specifically, kilovolt-level, kiloamp-level, and temperatures above 150 celsius. If you double your battery voltage from 400V (current standard) to 800V, you halve your resistive losses in the "wires" for the same electrical power demanded. Silicon MOSFETS that can withstand a kilovolt and a kiloamp are very big and very expensive. You get more power delivered for the same power leaving the battery. Size: SiC's very high thermal conductivity means less of a margin of safety for secondary breakdown. SiC tolerates higher current density (amps/square mm) than Si, so smaller devices are possible, saving mass. Its temperature stability allows it to be sintered to the package heatsink--further improving heat removal. Tolerance for high temperatures means you need less mass and volume for heat dissipation structures. Other efficiencies: With very high currents (kiloamp) and medium frequency switching, SiC IGBTs provide more benefits, because rather than being directly proportional to current as with MOSFETs, losses are proportional to the log of current. Alternatively, doubling the battery voltage again to 1.5kV (and so halving the currents) might allow Hyundai to use more aluminium for the "wires", with a cost saving over copper.
- formerly_proven 5y ago

dreamcompiler 5y ago

Why is SiC a good thing? 1. It has a higher bandgap energy than silicon, which means it can tolerate more heat without breaking down. It also means the junctions can be physically smaller. 2. Smaller junctions mean the transistors can switch faster, which means less time spent in the linear region, which means they generate less waste heat than silicon transistors. 3. SiC also has lower ON resistance, which means less waste heat still. 4. SiC conducts heat better than silicon, so removing its [lesser] waste heat is easier and requires a smaller heat sink apparatus. All of this makes SiC a fantastic technology for power electronics. (It's less important for signal electronics, but even signal electronics waste small amounts of power so reducing that further is still relevant.) For EVs, SiC inverters mean less mass for an EV to carry around. Less mass per se doesn't matter as much as you might think for an EV because with regenerative braking you get back some of your acceleration energy when you decelerate. However, air resistance matters enormously in an EV because you can't get back the energy you lost pushing the car through the air. And "less mass" also means "smaller" and "smaller" means "more opportunities to make the car aerodynamically efficient."

sonium 5y ago
Thank you for answering everything I ever wondered about SiC. Are there any other semiconductors that would be even better than SiC in all four points?
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Diamond is even better in terms of bandgap and thermal conductivity (one way jewelers verify a diamond is real is by checking to see if the gem has ridiculously high thermal conductivity). But diamond semiconductors are much too expensive ATM. Gallium Nitride is the closest competitor to SiC now; it's better than SiC for high frequency applications but worse for high temperature applications and GaN is somewhat harder to manufacture. But that's changing rapidly. https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/silicon-carbide-and-gallium-nitride-compared https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/silico...
  - 5y ago

xyzzy21 5y ago

So wrong! Non-silicon is 10x-100x more expensive and 10x-100x less fit for most applications. Non-silicon (aka compound semiconductors) are only 1% of all semiconductor revenue and volume. Switching from majority semiconductor to tiny minority semiconductor is NOT going to solve any supply problems!! SiC and GaN are STILL made on silicon and most of the circuitry is still silicon. Only the power transistors are using non-silicon. Mostly a nonsense article.

thehappypm 5y ago
So obvious you didn't read the article.

tardismechanic 5y ago

> but electric vehicles are helping chip away at its dominance in the pursuit of energy efficiency. I suspect the authors did not intend that pun ("chip away", get it ;-) ) Is there a name for such unintentional puns?

tus89 5y ago

Thanks God the beaches are running out of sand!

Animats 5y ago

Active work has been going on in this area for years, for really high power applications.[1] Locomotives. Power substations. Wind turbines. At the low end, silicon carbide gates have been used for wall wart power supplies, in low volume. Looks like it's finally making it into automotive, which makes sense. [1] https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/high_megawatt/Approved-Raju-DoE_NIST_HMW_VSD_GE_raju.pdf https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/pml/high_megawat...

MertsA 5y ago
>Applications for HV SiC >Data center distribution - MV AC or DC to the rack, (13.8kV distribution to match gensets What the hell are they smoking? MV to the row, maybe, but are they seriously proposing MV terminating to a power supply in every rack??? That seems like it'd be an installation and maintenance nightmare. I feel like it'd be much more sensible to at least limit in-rack power to 480V max. Stick with something that doesn't require DC techs to use a hot stick to plug in a new rack.