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and equipment will continue through 2025. Once fully
operational, MUSiC will allow external partners to bring
designs for rapid prototyping, shortening development
cycles and keeping intellectual property secure in the
United States.
This matters nationally. Europe, Japan, and Southeast
Asia already have public-private collaborations around
silicon carbide. Germany, for example, has long funded
SiC research and production through Fraunhofer institutes, while Japan has advanced capabilities through
companies like Rohm. The U.S. has strong commercial
players but has lacked a federally supported, open-access
research fab. MUSiC positions Arkansas as the national
anchor point for that capability.
MUSiC does not stand alone. Fayetteville already
houses the High-Density Electronics Center (HiDEC),
one of the nation’s leading labs for packaging and
assembly of high-power electronics. HiDEC has decades
of experience taking fragile semiconductor dies and
mounting, interconnecting, and encapsulating them into
rugged packages suitable for real-world use in vehicles,
aircraft, and industrial systems.
Adjacent to MUSiC is the National Center for Reliable
Electric Power Transmission (NCREPT), which provides
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testing infrastructure at distribution-level voltages and
currents. With multiple 2-MVA test bays, NCREPT
can validate power electronic systems up to 13.8 kV,
bridging the gap between lab prototypes and utility-scale deployment. The Institute for Nanoscience and
Engineering adds additional cleanroom, nanofabrication,
and materials characterization capabilities, giving
researchers a full suite of tools to measure, etch, and
refine semiconductor devices.
Together, these centers form an end-to-end pipeline. A
design can start in CAD software, move to wafer fabrication inside MUSiC, be packaged in HiDEC, and then
validated at grid scale in NCREPT all without leaving
the University of Arkansas campus. Few institutions anywhere in the world can offer such a continuum, and none
in the United States can claim it with an open-access SiC
fab at the core.
This ecosystem exists because silicon carbide is different from the silicon that powered the computing age.
SiC is a wide bandgap semiconductor, which means
it can handle electric fields about ten times stronger
than silicon. Devices made from SiC can block higher
voltages, switch faster, and operate at junction temperatures exceeding 300 °C. The result is smaller, lighter,
and more efficient systems for
moving power.
For electric vehicles, that means
smaller inverters that waste less
energy, translating into longer
driving range. For renewable
energy systems, SiC allows more
efficient inverters that can integrate solar and wind into the grid
with less loss. For defense and
aerospace, it means electronics
that survive where silicon burns
out such as in jet engines, geothermal wells, or even on the
surface of Venus, where temperatures reach 460 °C. NASA has
already explored SiC electronics
for planetary missions, where
extreme reliability in high temperatures are essential.
The Arkansas group has
already proven how these ideas
translate into practice. Their
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researchers
www.semiconductordigest.com
