Silicon carbide SiC third generation semiconductor material

The semiconductor industry has a large market scale, a long industrial chain, a high technical threshold and a wide range of applications, which is the basis of modern electronic information industry. The industrial chain of the semiconductor industry mainly includes upstream semiconductor materials, midstream semiconductor components, and downstream applications. Semiconductor materials are a class of electronic materials with semiconductor properties (conductive ability between conductors and insulators) that can be used to make semiconductor devices and integrated circuits.

Midstream semiconductor components mainly include integrated circuits, sensors, discrete devices and optoelectronic devices:

(1) Integrated circuit (IC) is a miniature electronic device or component, through a special process to the required transistors, resistors, capacitors and inductors and other components and wiring interconnect together;

(2) The sensor is the primary link to achieve automatic detection and automatic control;

(3) Discrete devices are basic circuit components with a single function, such as transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc.;

(4) Optoelectronic devices are the constituent elements of optical fiber networks, which are mostly used in 5G communication and other fields. Semiconductor components can be used in downstream consumer electronics, network communication, industrial control, new energy, rail transit and photoelectric display and other major fields.

The scale of the global semiconductor industry shows a rising trend, and semiconductor materials are the main components of the upstream semiconductor industry chain. In recent years, the scale of the global semiconductor industry has shown a rising trend, and the compound annual growth rate of global semiconductor sales from 2014 to 2020 is 4.6%.

China's semiconductor industry also shows a continuous expansion of scale, driven by strong policy support and rapid prosperity of downstream applications and other factors, from 2014 to 2020, China's semiconductor sales compound annual growth rate of 8.7%, accounting for the proportion of global semiconductor sales increased from 27% in 2014 to 34% in 2020. It is currently the world's largest semiconductor consumer market.

Semiconductor materials play a key role in the manufacturing process of semiconducting products such as integrated circuits and discrete devices. Common semiconductor manufacturing materials include silicon (Si), germanium (Ge) and other elemental semiconductors and gallium arsenide (GaAs), silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN) and other compound semiconductor materials, in which the semiconducting of silicon carbide, gallium nitride and other compounds as materials belong to the third generation of compound semiconductor materials.