Simulation and performance comparison of Silicon and Silicon carbide based DC-DC Buck Boost converter using LTSpice

Recently semiconductor industry witnessed a revolutionary change with the development of wide band gap devices namely silicon carbide and gallium nitride. These devices are found to be superior to silicon because of their ability to be operated at high frequency, high temperature and high voltage with reduced switching losses. In this paper a comparison between Silicon and Silicon carbide semiconductor materials are done with the help of LTSpice software by considering DC-DC Buck Boost converter topology. It can be seen that the efficiency of the converter significantly increases when SiC switches are used for switching. With the use of SiC it is possible to increase the switching frequency which will considerably reduce the size of the filters making converter compact. At present, the only challenge faced by wide band gap device industry is its cost since the technology is not yet mature enough to make it easily available.