SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP314: An Overview of Toshiba’s Strength in Power Electronics with Jake Canon

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

Daniel is joined by Jake Canon, senior business development engineer at Toshiba America Electronic Components. Jake is an enthusiastic contributor to the semiconductor industry and has been working closely with engineers to find new discrete power solutions for a wide variety of cutting-edge applications. Dan explores the… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of semi-wiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Jake Cannon, senior business development engineer at Toshiba, America Electronic Components. Jake is an enthusiastic contributor to the semiconductor industry and has been working closely with engineers to find new discrete power solutions. for a wide variety of cutting-edge applications. Welcome to the podcast, Jake. Thanks, Daniel. It's great to be here. First, let me ask what brought you to Tashiba.

Yeah, and honestly, Tashiba was a great opening for me to get closer to customers and understand electronic designs from a level that's very hands-on. You know, you see these products in the world, and there's a little bit of satisfaction in knowing that you got to help with that. Tashba offered a great opportunity into that field. Great. So tell us a little bit about Tashiba's role in power electronics.

That's a great question. So Tashiba really has a long history in power electronics. In fact, this year we're celebrating our 150th anniversary as a company. We have a very longstanding history that is based around broad technology and a diverse product offering. In fact, throughout our lifetime, we've had a lot of pioneering technologies, you know, things like transistors, flash memory, things that we've done very well. over time. And today, you know, we're looking at current focus on reliability and efficient solutions. So it's very important for us to have an overall scope of the industry and offer products to support all of them. So for us, you know, we look at products like discrete devices,

which includes MOSFETs, IGBTs, transistors, diodes, isolators, analog and power ICs like motor drivers, op-amps, power management ICs like LDOs, load switches, and effuse, along with logic ICs. And we kind of round that out with some digital products like arm cortex, microcontrollers for like motor control type of applications, as well as cool things like interface bridges for things like HD might admit B and other kinds of protocols. So Toshiba cares a lot about this whole realm of electronics. We specialize in power electronics because quite frankly, everything needs power. So it's very important for us to have the best technology there. Absolutely. So let's talk about MOSFETs. Low voltage MOSFETs are a focus for Toshiba. Can you explain how

advancements have been made in silicon technology and packaging and how they impact performance? Absolutely. So the cool thing about MOSFETs is, first of all, it's an old technology, right? But every generation that, you know, every company releases just gets incrementally better, and Toshiba's no stranger to that. So for us, you know, they're a very important part of the power electronics market, and it's a very strong focus for us as a result. So Toshiba has a process, it's called UMOS, which is a trench fete, and funny enough, it's in the shape of a U, hence the fitting name, but the UMOS process basically allows us to improve R on A, which is a characteristic, it's a figure of merit, and it basically indicates how good your technology is. So with every new generation, we try to offer unique solutions and find improvements in areas like switching loss, high temperature operation, paralleling moss vets, and, you know, we have a new generation, we have to offer unique solutions, and find improvements in areas like switching loss, high temperature operation, paralleling moss vets. And, you know, we are just now entering our 11th generation of UMOS.

So our UMOS 11 process just came out for 100-volt MOSFETs. And this one in particular focuses on switching and reverse recovery loss. So we find a lot of newer applications require a bit more on that side of things instead of conduction loss. But, of course, you know, we see a nice little improvement there as well. So in terms of packaging, you know, that is a different story because you have the technology inside. How do you interface with it? So for us, we are very committed to offering industry standard and thermally optimized packaging for all the power names you could have in a variety of applications. In fact, some of our most popular packages are like single and dual side five by six packages called SOP and DSOP Advanced.

We also have some new modern variants that have like source connected pins, which funny enough, it just looks like an E, so we call it SOP Advanced E. But really, such a small change can actually give some big differences. So in this case, this new package offers 20% more Dye space compared to the original SOP advanced. And that is Dyspace you can use to improve RDS on. So as a result, you know, packaging is a very important part of the technology in addition to the silicon inside. And can you share examples of emerging applications where low voltage mosfets are playing, you know, transformative role? And there are a lot of them. So one of the big things right now that we're seeing as a mover is automotive space.

Obviously, vehicles need to have the most performance possible, last the longest, and they have to be baying for your buck, right? The budget has to be there. So for us, we see a lot of requirements for low voltage MOSFETs, and it's really around the 48-volt system. So when we talk low voltage, we're talking, say, 30-volt to 150-250-volt, and that usually correlates to a battery voltage in vehicles. So for us, low voltage battery management, DC to DC converters that would be on board, body control, electric control units, power steering, infotainment, you know, these are kind of applications in vehicles that would kind of play around that 48-volt space. So as a result, they're probably going to be using like 100-volt mosfettes, 80-volt mosfets. So it's very important for us to offer that for the automotive space. Now, there's many others, a couple being industrial automation and renewable energy.

These kind of go hand-in-hand because we look at things like motor control for industrial automation, power modules, and just the whole power conversion scheme. As we step down higher voltages to lower voltages, low voltage, low-voltages, low-voltage MOSFETs are important there. And renewable energy, we're seeing applications like microinverters and optimizers kind of take center stage because these are applications where your performance that you see as a customer directly correlates to how good these MOSFETs are. So the better they are, the better efficiency you have, the more energy you're getting from your grid, and the better you feel about installing solar panels on your house. So it's very important for us to play in that renewable energy space, and that continues to grow also. Then the final one, which is more prevalent today than ever, is data centers. And obviously, AI is very power-hungry,

and as AI continues to expand, we need to make sure that in our product offering, it can help support efficient server power supplies and modules so also like automotive data centers really love 48 volts that's a very common voltage here and that's where you're going to see a lot of 100 volt MOSFETs so you might step down from some high level AC down to 48 volt DC and that's where our FETs play best supporting that efficiency allowing these CPU AI chips to increase their power and we support that no problem and we try to be as cool as we can be so really you can see there's a lot of of ways that low-voltage mosfets support the electronics industry. Honestly, in a lot of ways, people don't expect. So for me, it's very important that Toshiba continues to play here and

offers new novel solutions. Great examples. So what are the most critical parameters engineers should consider when selecting a low-voltage MOSFET for their design? Yeah, and that's a good question because, you know, a lot of times people think about mosfets biopically, right? It's just a voltage, a resistance, and maybe a package. But in reality, there's a lot of push and pull going on there so you know some of the key characteristics that we see on the electronic side or the electrical side is going to be vds drain source voltage and this is something that you're going to probably want to spec be 20 to 30 percent above your peak voltage so even more you know some cases we like to have extra head room in case there's transients

basically we always want to make sure we're within these specs so vds like i said 48 full system you use 100-bolt MOSFet for instance so that's kind of the first cutoff right As long as your VDS is acceptable, at least the FET will work. But then we look at drain current, right? How much power do we actually need to pull through this FET? And drain current is kind of synonymous with RDS on. Drain current also depends on the footprint in how you cool this thing. So if you had a same level of RDS on but much better cooling, you know, you could get more current.

Generally speaking, they are more or less parallel. So drain current is important, but RDSON is going to determine another trader. off, and that is RDS on versus gate charge. So if you want really good RDS on, your gauge might not be as good. However, with the better UMOS process that we have, we can kind of improve this trade-off quite a bit. So we can tinker with this, but the point being, there's not one solution that fits every application. So Toshiba has things built into the devices like a faster body diode. In fact, this new UMOS 11 process features this, and the fast body diode really helps with things like motors, drives, and synchronous rectification.

And what this does is it results in lower recovery loss. So we like to have what we call this high speed type and then a standard type. So we would have applications where you might use one or the other, whether it's like a load switching application or a DC to DC application. So we kind of have to figure that out, which of these is going to fit best in your circuit. And then we look at things like safe operating area, and that's maybe an application's like hot swaps or maybe where there's more sustained power going through this. very important to stay within this area. And then finally, you know, how do we take the heat

out of this device? And packages like the DSOP advance, like I talked about, has dual-side cooling. So you're going to have a thermal pad on the top and the bottom. And if you have a good heat sync setup, you can pull that heat out very easily. So we look at all of these factors of choosing a MOSFET. And the cool thing about our portfolio is that you probably will find one that fits your requirement. The performance is there, the package is there, and our support is top-notch. We have all the data needed to support product development, whether that's like P-Spice, L-T-Spice models, any sort of board layouts, schematics. We have all of that on our website, so hopefully it's very easy for you to do that. Select a MOSFET. Great answer. Thank you, Jake.

So on the geopolitical side, what investments has Soshiba made on the manufacturing front to address growing demand in a challenging global environment? That's a great question, because today, more than ever we're looking at country of origin and we look at our process we look at our yield we look at our output so we pride at ourselves having a very strong manufacturing process and really that is all centered around our new 300 millimeter fab which is in kaga japan along with a lot of our other fabs so obviously we're a japanese company a lot of what we do is in japan actually all of what we do is in japan for the front end the front end being the wave for manufacturing so going back to the 300-millimeter stuff, that's a 12-inch wafer, and that improves our output by a lot.

But we take that output, we dice it, we put it in packaging, and the packaging side of it is also done in Japan, and some of it is done in Thailand. So we have our own fabs in both locations, so it's very important for us to be vertically integrated. And in addition to not only just the manufacturing side of things, we also care about business continuity, because it's very important for us to have a plan that has more than two backups for any product that we sell. So in the case of an earthquake or something, you know, we can always easily shift a product to another factory and make sure our customers are staying up and running. And also, for example, when COVID was shutting down fabs left and right, you know, Feshiba had a very good plan in place

to navigate these difficult times. And we actually began investing further right then to make sure that we're prepared for any more unexpected events. And I mentioned this a little bit earlier, But, you know, Japan is a very seismically active country, of course, whether it's earthquakes, tsunami, or Godzilla, there's always something going on. And all of our fabs are equipped with state-of-the-art equipment to have countermeasures against these kind of impacts. So it's very important for us to minimize the impact of earthquakes and so on and be able to support manufacturing for our customers whenever they need it. That's great. So final question, Jake. How does Tashiva ensure reliability and long-term performance of its low-voltage MOSFets in mission-critical applications?

That's a great question, Daniel. And honestly, it's a good one to end on because for us, reliability is really a cornerstone of our technology. You know, when we design a device, we're thinking about any potential edge cases. Basically, modern applications present so many of them. I talked about this earlier, EVs and renewable energies. They're in areas where heat can be just extremely. stream environments are not controlled, and we need to make sure that we can support in all those applications. So for us, we want to go above and beyond to make sure that our parts are specced carefully and all data in the data sheets are guaranteed with additional margin baked in. And you know, we talked about automotive.

We take the ACQ standards, which is what many automotive makers need in all of their components. We take that, and in actually many cases, we go two to three times higher than that. So that's how concerned we are about producing MOSFETs that will last. We know that customers have come to No Toshiba for our reliability and our responsiveness around supporting their technical documents and their and their all of their QA support. And we work to maintain this reputation in all kinds of applications, new and old. So for us, you know, power MOSFETs aren't just a product in our lineup.

They're a critical piece of our mission to bring energy efficiency to a world that's so power-oriented and desperate to eke out even the small fraction of a percent of efficiency. Any improvements you can find through MOSFETs really helps to improve your overall design. And that's why I think Shiba has such a great offering to support that. We've got the expertise of a very long time of development. And I think we can bring products that can really make our customers happy with how their product performs. Great. Hey, excellent conversation, Jake. I really enjoyed it. Hopefully we can have you back again. It'd be great, Daniel. I'd like you too. Thank you so much for the time.

That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.