| Phil Neudeck, Electronics Engineer, NASA’s John Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, OH |
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| Oct 31 2007 | |
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NASA Tech Briefs: Can you tell us about the project and the technology that has resulted? Phil Neudeck: Historically, it’s been recognized for a number of years that there’s a need for high-temperature electronics in both turbine engines and aerospace applications, as well as automotive applications. So there actually is a high-temperature electronics field that has evolved over the years. There are regularly scheduled professional high-temperature electronics conferences, and things of that nature.
advertisement: Electronics are already incorporated in automobile engines and jet engines at this point in time, but they’re not nearly as high-temperature as what we’re developing here. So it’s sort of an evolutionary process, if you will, with high-temperature electronics. The more capable the electronics are, the more they get inserted into new places to bring benefits to those systems. It’s just that nobody has been able to make semiconductor electronics work at these temperatures [500° C] for much longer than an hour or two until now, so we’ve expanded the envelope of what’s possible here. Parts have to last a long time in order to be useful for most applications. That’s what we’ve done with our accomplishments at 500° C.
Our group has been working with high-temperature electronics for a number of years. Our approach is to use silicon carbide as a semiconductor instead of silicon. Traditionally, silicon is the semiconductor material that all of your computers, cell phones, and every other electronic device are made of. But silicon has its temperature limits; there are physics involved in why silicon can’t operate at extremely high temperatures. Silicon carbide electronics have other applications as well in the area of high-power devices operating at room temperature, RF power devices - there are important applications for silicon carbide other than just high-temperature electronics. Our research group has worked in those areas, too. |
The Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA's Glenn Research Center has developed a new silicon carbide differential amplifier integrated circuit chip that may provide benefits to anything requiring long-lasting electronic circuits in very hot environments. The chip exceeded 1,700 hours of continuous operation at 500ºC - a breakthrough that represents a 100-fold increase in what has previously been achieved. Phil Neudeck is the team lead for this work.