In the three semiconductor fields of discrete semiconductor devices, power semiconductor devices, and custom ICs, Fuji Electric has repeated technological innovation and made efforts to accomplish high performance, contributing to power electronics development. This paper describes the present status and prospect of semiconductor devices for automobiles, inverters for household electric appliances, traction inverters, general-purpose inverters, displays, and information terminals.

Recently, the public has taken a growing interest in the protection of the earth environment. By means of electronics, the automobile engine is going to materialize opposed technologies such as cleaning exhaust gases, reducing fuel cost, and producing high power together. Fuji Electric has put on the market bipolar transistors and resin type high-voltage diodes for the advanced distributorless ignition system (DLIS) which were put to practical use to optimize engine control. This paper introduces these semiconductor devices.

Traction inverter systems are showing rapid progress in performance with the progress of power semiconductor devices. The mainstream of traction power semiconductor devices has been gate turn-off thyristors. Nowadays, insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) attract attention because of their high-speed switching performance. This paper describes technical trends of inverter systems and power semiconductor devices in traction application and Fuji Electric's lineup for them. It also introduces a newly developed 1,800V/600A IGBT module.

Electronic displays now used in the display units of information, communication and OA apparatus have wide applications as the means of information transmission and man-machine interfaces. This paper, taking up ICs for liquid crystal displays and high-voltage diodes for high-resolution CRT monitors from among semiconductor devices for displays, outlines their features, main characteristics and applications.

As information society progresses, information terminal devices play a more important role in the society and begin to spread from enterprises to homes. For the further development of these devices, still more improvements in size, weight, energy consumption, efficiency, and cost are required. Because of product liability enforced this year, safety is indispensable more strictly than before. To meet the situation, Fuji Electric has developed semiconductor devices for various information terminals utilizing its own high-voltage technology. This paper introduces the characteristics, etc. of these devices.

Power electronics has made remarkable progress. The inverter is one of fields making rapidest progress because power devices as its key components have greatly improved in performance, functions, and capacity. Recently, the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) has been applied to devices for inverters and its low power dissipation contributes to the size reduction and performance improvement of inverters. This paper introduces Fuji Electric's New Third-generation IGBT modules (N series) which attained ease of use and high reliability in addition to the low loss of the former IGBTs.

A considerable number of recent household electric appliances have come to use inverter control. Cookers represented by microwave ovens and induction heating rice cookers played a pioneering part and then inverter fluorescent lamps followed. This paper introduces molded IGBTs and power MOSFETs developed by Fuji Electric for these firlds.