Today, the need for higher efficiency in end products is more critical than ever. Although silicon power products continue to see incremental improvements, devices based on compound semiconductor materials deliver significantly better performance — in a large number of cases not possible with their silicon counterparts. This is certainly true for the most basic components in power electronics: diodes and transistors. Silicon carbide (SiC) Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) have been available for more than a decade but were not commercially viable until recently. As a pioneer in SiC technology, ROHM Semiconductor expects that volume production will lead to SiC’s acceptance in more and more applications.