Nexperia introduces new 1200V silicon carbide MOSFETs

     Nexperia announced the availability of its industry-leading 1200 V silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFETs in a D2PAK-7 Surface Mount Device (SMD) package available in 30, 40, 60 and 80 mΩ RDSon values. This follows Nexperia's announcement in late 2023 of two separate SiC MOSFET devices in 3-pin and 4-pin TO-247 packages. It will allow its SiC MOSFET portfolio to rapidly expand to include devices with RDSon values of 17, 30, 40, 60 and 80 mΩ in flexible packages.

     With the release of the NSF0xx120D7A0, Nexperia is meeting the growing demand for high-performance SiC switches in SMD packages such as the D2PAK-7. Such switches are becoming increasingly popular in various industrial applications such as electric vehicle (EV) charging (charging pile), uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), and solar and energy storage system (ESS) inverters. This is further evidence of the successful strategic partnership between Nexperia and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (MELCO), which together have pushed the energy efficiency and electrical performance of SiC wideband gap semiconductors to new heights, while also increasing the future production capacity of the technology to meet growing market demand.

     RDSon is a key performance parameter for SiC MOSFETs because it affects conducted power loss. However, many manufacturers focus only on the nominal value, ignoring the fact that as the operating temperature of the device increases, the RDSon can increase by more than 100% compared to the nominal value at room temperature, resulting in considerable conduction losses. Nexperia found that this is one of the factors that limit the performance of many SiC devices on the market today, and the new SiC MOSFETs use innovative process technology features to achieve industry-leading RDSon temperature stability, with only a 38% increase in nominal RDSon values over the operating temperature range of 25 ° C to 175 ° C.

     The strict threshold voltage VGS(th) specification enables these MOSFET discrete devices to provide balanced current-carrying performance when in parallel. In addition, the lower body diode forward voltage (VSD) helps to improve device robustness and efficiency, while also easing the dead-time requirement for continuous current operation.