Following six years of R&D, Raytheon has opened a silicon carbide fab in Glenrothes Scotland which will offer foundry services as well as its own line of high-temperature ICs.
Its SiC process has been developed on-site, with Government and EU funding, and in collaboration with UK universities.
"Via the Technology Strategy Board, we have been involved with the Universities of Newcastle, Strathclyde, Manchester; and more loosely with Warwick and Heriot-Watt. The list goes on, there is an awful lot of interest in wide-bandgap semiconductors," Raytheon business unit manager Paul D'Arcy told Electronics Weekly.
There has also been collaboration with companies up and down the supply chain - substrate and epi developers for example.
Raytheon has an established 100mm silicon fab in Glenrothes.
"We have had a business selling application-specific specialist and custom silicon ICs for 20-25 years; for automotive, fire and security sensing, for example," said D'Arcy. 
Silicon carbide programme
The silicon carbide programme has involved adding SiC-capable equipment to the silicon line, backed-up by outside firms for processes not available on-site.
"It has been research and development up to this point. We have been making technology demonstrators for various people and have had to use some specialist sub-contractors from around the world. Now we are bringing the whole SiC capability together," said D'Arcy.
The official opening marks the installation of all equipment needed offer a complete SiC service, which has included units for high temperature annealing, high temperature implantation, metallisation, and testing at high-voltage.
"Now we don't need sub-contractors, we can speed up cycles of learning and speed up product to market," said D'Arcy.
Silicon carbide wafers are small. The Glenrothes fab can handle up to 4in (100mm).
"Wafer technology has been growing through 2in and 3in," said D'Arcy. "State-of-the-art is 4in and is likely to be for some time. In time, when they solve the technical issues, it will go to 6in and we will then need to move."
Acting as a foundry, products will include power transistors, while the companies own-brand products will be application specific ICs.
"Our own research is focussed on high-temperature ICs using our intellectual property developed with universities and the Technology Strategy Board. We are not designing power components as we do not want to compete with our customers," said D'Arcy.
Lithography does not need to be state-of-the-art.
Power components "For niche markets like high-temperature ICs, what we find is that our geometry is perfect. People are focussing on high-temperature, not high density. No one is making high volume, there is no iPod," said D'Arcy. "Right now, the SiC products that are selling are power components - typically 2-3µm is all we really need drive 600V and 1,200V and 1,700V. In the IC area, where most of our research is, we are making lots of logic with transistors of 1.2µm gate length at the moment."
Unusually in the SiC world, Raytheon can make CMOS.
"We have p-mosfets and n-mosfets on the same substrate. We know of some competitors that just have n-mos. We have been to various conferences and have demonstrated logic and some analogue on SiC CMOS," said D'Arcy.
400°C transistors and 300°C CMOS is on offer.
"We are aiming at an IC market that is 300°C, we do have the potential to go to 400°C," said D'Arcy.
Amongst Technology Strategy Board-funded demonstrations have been a high-temperature instrumentation amplifier and gate drivers for power switches. There have also been SiC chips that mimic some 74 series TTL for reliability testing.
"What we see on future power supplies are SiC power transistors, and it is an advantage to have the gate drive close to the transistor, so you need a high-temperature gate driver.
This is the first SiC fab in the UK, and one of only a few globally.
"What we will see is market growth for coming years," said D'Arcy. "Because it is an emerging technology, people need small development runs and multi-project wafers. We have got to offer them small-scale runs to get them into production. We will cater for development, prototyping and production."
The company has a power module design group on the same site.
"For a hybrid electric vehicle, we can design a power H-bridge, for example. We have done something like this for Prodrive and the University of Manchester." said D'Arcy.
Oxfordshire-based Prodrive, the University of Manchester, Raytheon, car-maker Tatra and some other firms are working on a 97% efficient 58kW multi-port prototype power converter.
Designed to save space and keep cooling in one place in hybrid or all-electric vehicles, it can shift energy in any direction between a 300V battery, 600V motor and a 100V super-capacitor bank - for example dividing regenerative braking energy between the battery and super-capacitors.
It also provides 12V for legacy systems and 150V for electric power steering and air-conditioning.
Gallium nitride on silicon is being touted as a significant threat to the development of the SiC component market?
"If GaN wants to play in power arena, they are going to be limited to 600V, or maybe 1,200V," said D'Arcy. "For serious power, you are going to need SiC. People are researching SiC up to 15kV."
