Our mission: Bring the Benefits of Silicon Carbide (SiC) Technology to Customer-Specific Applications.

How? The company is producing two new technologies.

First, it is manufacturing silicon carbide-based, wide band gap, superlattice wafers for high power electric switching devices and high temperature, high speed chips. Superlattice is an alloy of different elements used to form a highly-ordered, crystal lattice structure in semiconductor materials. Wide band gap semiconductors such as silicon carbide have about three times the band gap of silicon with corresponding increases in power density, temperature tolerance, speed and voltage.

Second, C9 plans to manufacture silicon and silicon carbide wafers of its advanced Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) technology, which is used for high speed and harsh environment microprocessors and control chips.

The problem: For 40 years, researchers and the government have been trying to produce silicon carbide semiconductors, which have a Figure of Merit improvement of 136 over silicon. Figure of Merit is a number that represents a composite of all the positive features of semiconductor material.

What has held back the success of silicon carbide is manufacturing difficulty. The extreme temperatures - 1,600 and 1,800 C – needed to produce SiC result in defects such as micropipes, which show up as Swiss cheese-like holes in the wafer, and screw dislocations, which are crystal imperfections throughout the material.

C9 believes it has the solution.