Spotlight: Hybrid Electric Vehicles

“Amid soaring gasoline prices, car makers are rushing to use hybrid engines, which boost fuel efficiency by combining a traditional gasoline motor with an electric one…Auto-industry analyst J.D. Power & Associates forecasts that 750,000 hybrids will be sold by 2012, or 4.1% of all sales that year, but car-industry executives say they may sell far more than that as long as the technology continues to improve.”

- Wall Street Journal, Power Struggle: As Hybrid Cars
Gain Traction, Industry Battles Over Designs, 10/19/05

The emergence of hybrid vehicles is a major opportunity for makers of silicon carbide and devices based on the material. As reported in Compound Semiconductor magazine (Silicon Carbide set to reduce size of hybrid electric engines, 6/05), there are fundamental limitations to silicon technology which prevent even cutting edge silicon-based electronic components from meeting the demands of hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) platforms. According to the magazine, this creates a crucial role for silicon carbide-based components, which are “already poised to provide a means to improve HEV system efficiency, while reducing the need for elaborate thermal management systems that add size, weight and cost to vehicles.”

Forbes magazine (A Power Portfolio, 4/11/05) writes that “By 2015 almost every new car and truck will be built around a hybrid drive…companies that catch the wave are going to prosper.” A critical factor propelling this shift, the magazine explains, is the revolutionary improvement in performance and price of power electronics over the past decade: “Since 1994 power supplies have shrunk three-fold, and prices have dropped more than fivefold. It is the dramatic though little noted advance in power semiconductors, together with parallel improvements in sensors and microprocessors, that have made the silicon drivetrain compact and affordable enough for cars.” But the ability of silicon-based devices to continue to achieve such efficiency gains is limited by the material’s inherent characteristics. Instead, writes Forbes, “look to companies…to deliver transistors built on diamond-like silicon carbide, propelling another ten-fold improvement in both power density and price.”

The opportunity for silicon carbide in the hybrid power market is not limited to automobiles. According to Forbes, “hybrids have, in fact, already taken over completely under the hoods of vehicles too big to fit in your garage. GE's 6,000hp locomotive is powered by an enormous diesel-fueled, engine-driven generator; everything beyond is electric. Ixys supplies high-power silicon transistor modules for the locomotives built by Siemens/ABB. Komatsu's 930E 300-ton mining truck is electric-propelled, feeding off a 2-megawatt generator powered by a diesel engine. The surface ships now on the Navy's drawing boards are all-electric, from the propellers to the guns.”