Why SiC and GaN Need Their Own Qualification Standards

By DR. PRADYUMNA GUPTA, Founder & Chief Scientist, Infinita Lab

Silicon carbide and gallium nitride power devices have moved quickly into EV inverters, onboard chargers, solar inverters and data center power supplies. But Dr. Pradyumna Gupta of Infinita Lab argues the qualification standards used to vouch for them, including JEDEC JESD47, AEC-Q101 and the JESD22 stress tests, were built around silicon failure modes.

Wide-bandgap materials fail differently. In SiC, basal plane dislocations can grow into stacking faults that cause bipolar degradation, and gate oxide traps and breakdown behavior don’t follow silicon models. In GaN, charge trapping causes dynamic on-resistance shifts known as current collapse, and dielectric traps cause threshold instability. Even test conditions fall short: high-temperature reverse-bias testing at 80% of rated voltage means 960 V for a 1,200 V SiC MOSFET, so many labs test at lower stress.

The result, Gupta writes, is qualification data that looks good on paper but says little about what will actually degrade a SiC or GaN device over its service life. Closing that gap, he concludes, is the central challenge for power electronics as the technology moves to higher voltages, temperatures and frequencies.

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