BYD to Open Largest Silicon Carbide Plant

TapTechNews June 13th. During the China Auto Chongqing Forum this month on the 7th, Li Yunfei, general manager of BYD's brand and public relations department, said that BYD's new silicon carbide plant will become the largest in the industry.

Li Yunfei said in the interview, We started making cars in 2003, but we established BYD's semiconductor team in 2002. We've been doing semiconductors for a year longer than making cars. In 2008, we acquired Ningbo Zhongwei Semiconductor (a Taiwanese-funded enterprise), and at that time, there was an uproar in the industry! You want to make cars and mobile phone electronic components, and suddenly you acquire a semiconductor (company) and want to do what? We didn't do it transparently enough at that time. Actually, when we entered the automotive industry, we were aiming for electric vehicles. Electrification and intelligentization come with the demand for semiconductor material modules such as IGBT, so we started investing very early.

Li Yunfei also disclosed that BYD's latest silicon carbide plant will go into operation in the second half of this year, and its production capacity scale is the world's first and ten times that of the second place. Every electric car company says that they use silicon carbide, which is very costly, but it is indeed a good thing.

Starting from the second half of this year, BYD's models around 200,000 will also carry intelligent solutions applying silicon carbide to achieve a wider range of applications such as intelligent driving, and it will be covered in the form of OTA (if the hardware is available) or the launch of new models (if the hardware is not available).

According to TapTechNews' previous report, BYD had showcased 6 high-precision and sophisticated power device products at the 2021 World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference: V-215, V-305 (silicon carbide module), V-SSDC (silicon carbide module), V-DUAL1, IGBT wafer, and FRD wafer.

And during the Beijing Auto Show this year, BYD had exhibited a 1200V1040A high-power silicon carbide module. This module was first released in June 2022, and the module power was significantly increased by nearly 30% without changing the original module packaging size, which is mainly used in the motor drive controller of new energy vehicles.