Addressing European Policies for 2020 and beyond the “Power Semiconductor and Electronics Manufacturing 4.0” (SemI40) project responds to the urgent need of increasing the competitiveness of the Semiconductor manufacturing industry in Europe through establishing smart, sustainable, and integrated ECS manufacturing. SemI40 will further pave the way for serving highly innovative electronic markets with products powered by microelectronics “Made in Europe”. Positioned as an Innovation Action it is the high ambition of SemI40 to implement technical solutions on TRL level 4-8 into the pilot lines of the industry partners. Challenging use cases will be implemented in real manufacturing environment considering also their technical, social and economic impact to the society, future working conditions and skills needed. Applying “Industry 4.0”, “Big Data”, and “Industrial Internet” technologies in the electronics field requires holistic and complex actions. The selected main objectives of SemI40 covered by the MASP2015 are: balancing system security and production flexibility, increase information transparency between fields and enterprise resource planning (ERP), manage critical knowledge for improved decision making and maintenance, improve fab digitalization and virtualization, and enable automation systems for agile distributed production. SemI40’s value chain oriented consortium consists of 37 project partners from 5 European countries. SemI40 involves a vertical and horizontal supply chain and spans expertise and partners from raw material research, process and assembly innovation and pilot line, up to various application domains representing enhanced smart systems. Through advancing manufacturing of electronic components and systems, SemI40 contributes to safeguard more than 20.000 jobs of people directly employed in the participating facilities, and in total more than 300.000 jobs of people employed at all industry partners’ facilities worldwide.

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.

Within this project a new compact and efficient high speed 30-50 kW electrical machine will be integrated with an efficient fully SiC drive and a gearbox within a powertrain traction module. The electrical machine will have a dry rotor direct liquid cooling system integrated with the cooling system for the SiC drive. This traction module can be mechanically coupled with an axle of a low performance electric/hybrid vehicle, or several units could be coupled directly with the wheels for a high performance vehicle or a light-duty vehicle or a bus. Economic feasibility of mass-manufacturing of different electric machine topologies will be studied to choose the best trade-off between performance, manufacturing cost, and efficiency in the selected performance range. Feasibility of direct drive, single stage, and two-stage switchable high speed gearboxes will be studied as well. The resultant powertrain traction module will be an optimal trade-off between efficiency, manufacturability, and cost, utilizing newest technologies in electrical machines, power electronics, and high speed gearboxes. We will demonstrate the scalability of the solution by embedding several powertrain modules on board a test vehicle.