Silicon Carbide based power electronics use electrical energy significantly more efficient than current silicon-based semiconductors: gains from 6% to 30% are expected depending on application. TRANSFORM will provide European downstream market players with a reliable source of SiC components and systems based on an entirely European value chain - from substrates to energy converters. Its technical excellence strengthens the global competitive position of Europe. TRANSFORM improves current SiC technologies beyond state-of-the-art to serve large emerging markets for electric power conversion in renewable energies, mobility and industry. Substrate manufacturing process innovation will establish a new global standard: smart-cut technology allows high scalability, superior performance and reliability. Substrate and equipment manufacturers plus technology providers cooperate to increase maturity of the new processes from lab demonstration to pilot lines. Device manufacturers develop and tailor processes and device design based on the new substrate process, including adaptation of planarMOS and development of new TrenchMOS technology. Performance and reliability of devices is expected to increase greatly. For exploiting the potential of SiC devices, integration technologies and system design are improved concurrently, including new copper metallization processes for higher reliability and performance, module integration for high reliability and reduction of cost, and dedicated integrated driver technologies to optimize switching modes and parallel operation in high current applications. The project will demonstrate energy savings in applications (DC/AC, DC/DC, AC/DC) in the renewable energy domain, industry and automotive. TRANSFORM contributes to European societal goals and the green economy through significantly increasing energy efficiency by providing a competitive, ready-to-industrialized technology, strengthening Europes technological sovereignty in a critical field.

Climate change, CO2 footprint, energy transition, safety & security as well as sovereignty are key issues that the common population can very well relate to today. As we face critical challenges, research and development in our ECS domain needs to address them more than ever. In particular the energy transition needs to be accelerated in order to become more independent from gas and oil energy, which was considered being available at low costs and without limits until recently. This assumption has been proven to be based on very fragile grounds and it has come to an end. One solution to accelerate the energy transition is to use all generated energy. This means that overflow energy produced in wind or solar parks needs to be available in periods when common energy generation is lacking. This requires important investments into infrastructure, which will only flow, if investors trust into the technologies enabling solutions. The faster the trust is built, the faster the transition can be realized. On the other hand, technologies and products that will ensure an economic use of resources and enable long and trusted lifetime of systems and components in the ECS domain have to be developed. ARCHIMEDES contributes to this in the domains of automotive, aviation and industry. In ARCHIMEDES, components, models and methodologies to increase the efficiency and lifetime of the propulsion components, power components and energy storage devices in automotive, aviation and industry will be developed. This will support the energy transition on the consumer`s side. In order to support this mission, ARCHIMEDES aims to change technologies and products in the automotive, aviation, infrastructure domains and the related ecosystem towards a resilient, de-carbonized, digitalized, and green EU: It will help building trust in the new technologies and thus contribute to accelerating the energy transition, safety and security.

Scalability is one of the core challenges of present-day quantum technology. While many promising demonstrations have been performed at the level of tens of qubits, a vast leap will be required to create systems with the many thousands of physical qubits with the outstanding quality needed for the achievement of quantum computational advantage and high-bandwidth quantum communication. Spin centres in silicon carbide are an emerging platform for quantum information and communication. Some of these systems have long spin lifetimes and strong optical transitions in the near infrared optical spectrum. This optical band is advantageous for strong photonic enhancement, and for interfacing with low-loss waveguide and fiber networks. These defects possess electronic spins for photonic links, and nuclear spins for quantum information storage. The multilevel systems furthermore offer a platform for novel, resource-efficient quantum information methods based on high-dimensional encoding. Silicon carbide is a highly developed material platform, offering extremely high purity, transparency, and compatibility with eminently scalable semiconductor processing methods. In QuSPARC, we will develop and demonstrate wafer-scale processes to create thousands of near-identical qubit sites with spin control on a SiC wafer, and with optical enhancement interfaces using optical micro-resonators of extremely high quality. We will determine optimized methods for the control and readout of selected spin centres in SiC towards fault-tolerant implementations. Based on these insights, we will demonstrate high-fidelity spin initialization, spin measurement, spin-photon entanglement, and connectivity between sites on these microchips. QuSPARC will thereby achieve a disruptive step change in the development of scalable quantum information devices, leading the race towards the creation of million-qubit systems for high-performance quantum technology.

OSIRIS project, a Research and Innovation Action (RIA), aims at improving substantially the cost effectiveness and performance of gallium nitride (GaN) based millimetre wave components. The project proposes to elaborate innovative SiC material using isotopic sources. This material will offer thermal conductivity improvement of 30% which is important for devices dissipating a lot of power, in particular in SiC power electronics and in microwave device using GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMT) grown on SiC semi-insulating substrates. OSIRIS project will allow reinforcing GaN technology penetration into the market by cost effectiveness of the SiC substrates and circuit performances improvement thanks to better heat spreading close to the dissipative area. For microwave GaN/SiC HEMT this isotopic approach could create a complete shift in the currently used substrate / GaN epi-wafer technology; it intends to grow high thermal conductivity (+30%) semi-insulating SiC on top of low cost semiconducting SiC substrates (widely used by the power electronics and LED industries). Reduced layer thickness is necessary as only the top 50 to 100µm SiC wafer is really useful as the substrate itself is currently thinned to realise microstrip waveguided microwave circuits. For power electronics, this isotopic innovation will be essentially focused on thermal improvement, i.e. better electron mobility at a given power dissipation as mobility and drift mobility decrease with temperature and also better carrier transport thanks to lower scattering rates. Schottky and p-i-n diodes will be tested using this material, which however will have to be doped while microwave devices need semi-insulating materials. The improved thermal SiC properties will be obtained by using single isotopic atoms for silicon and carbon, namely 28Si and 12C. The SiC wafer size will be targeted to 100mm (4-inches) which is today widely used on industry.

REACTION will push through the first worldwide 200mm Silicon Carbide (SiC) Pilot Line Facility for Power technology. This will enable the European industry to set the world reference of innovative and competitive solutions for critical societal challenges, like Energy saving and CO2 Reduction as well as Sustainable Environment through electric mobility and industrial power efficiency. Establishing the first 200mm SiC Pilot Line in the world and developing the most innovative and cost competitive technology, this project will address mass-market applications like smart energy and smart mobility, and industrial. It will allow to meet the more and more increasing demand of requirements in terms of quality and cost constraint for next decade generation’s power electronics. The Project strength is the complete Pilot Line value chain implementation, integrating and optimizing partnership in the fields of SiC equipment developers, SiC process technologists, RTOs, and end users partners till the final applications context. This will allow to develop a full 8” SiC line ecosystem enhancing the competitiveness of EU- Industries down to the value chain in a market context where other countries today, such as the USA or Japan, are just starting to play on 6” SiC market. Innovative SiC power device Performances improvements, together with cost and size reductions, are the most relevant challenges addressed in the project that are expected to lead to a new stronger European supply chain for very compact SiC converters, from 600V to 2.2kV range, ideal for the addressed applications; the ambition is therefore to play a primary role towards excellence in Europe by a first generations of 8” SiC profitable Smart Mobility and Smart Energy products and components, primary access to IPs for the relevant essential capabilities, competitiveness of manufacturing in Europe.