Infineon marks innovation milestone with world’s first 300-millimeter power silicon carbide (SiC) wafer
PBusiness & Financial Press
Nov 09, 2026
Infineon presents industry-first functional power devices processed on 300-millimeter silicon carbide wafers
Technological breakthrough underlines Infineon’s innovation strength and leadership in power semiconductors and wide-bandgap technologies
300-millimeter SiC process feasibility lays the foundation for secure, future-proof SiC supply to customers in automotive, renewable energy, industrial and AI data center applications
Infineon will present the first processed 300-millimeter SiC wafer to the public at the electronica trade show starting 10 November 2026 in Munich
I doubt it will. You hv to consider memory tech may shift a bit towards LLM-first, so a kind of more computations in memory, and other innovations will be common and demand will not be lower especially if you consider average lifetime of a GPU card is 5 years, there will be demand like just to utilize all those racks to pay out all the money they borrow now. In memory compute will make AI more decentralized (still a hopium).
I think you missed the part where they(SK, Samsung and Micron) are a cartel forming a monopoly, and can control market prices regardless of demand via controlling the supply.
Sure, cartel behavior is illegal, but if you're in bed with the right political administrations, then eyes get closed.
They have been a cartel for decades, the have had boom and bust periods all the same. There's only so much money you can leave on the table before you snap and stab your cartel pals.
European investors and governments are risk averse. DRAM is one of the riskiest silicon products. They talk a lot about independence but European governments lack the raw investment power and willpower to make decade-long investments that are guaranteed to lose money in the next decade as DRAM. If Europe wants DRAM made in European soil, the governments and people should be ready for losing tens to hundreds of billions of taxpayer money.
When Korean and American factories ramp up, the price will plummet. Basically whatever business will not make a single Euro profit for years.
European silicon manufacturers target industrial and automotive for a reason. They want large, guaranteed contracts for older silicon nodes which are cheap and profitable. They let the US, China and Taiwan to take risk of developing new ones. When they do research, they prefer incremental ones.
When it comes to real talk Europe doesn't really care about independence more than it cares about capital and profits. Only an actual war will make the governments care and it will be too late. Without a strong drive to create one's own nuclear arsenal, don't expect any groundbreaking risky investment out Europe.
Then why are they investing in weapons? I mean, I get it for the investors. Governments are investing in weapons, so investors build what governments require. In the EU the problem is not building factories, it's selling what's being built while being sabotaged by the EU and it's import treaties letting Chinese vendors massively undercut their own industry to the point of bankrupting entire sectors (solar panels, plastics, now cars). But WHY do EU governments do this? (and why are they lending very large amounts of money to do it)
I mean, they must be aware of the basic facts: if you're making weapons of war best possible outcome is they sit unused in a basement. If they are used, the other guy's weapons will be going in the other direction and your weapons will not just not contribute to the economy, they'll literally have very strong negative contributions. Whichever of the 2 situations you're in, there will be no improvement for the population, no economic growth beyond the initial investment, no nothing.
For the governments buying the weapons this is a guaranteed zero-return-on-investment, with loaned money. Does it really need explaining how stupid this is from a financial viewpoint? In a few years this will become a drag on the EU economy of something like 10% of all taxes raised in the EU. And that's assuming they aren't actually used for anything, because then it'll be a 50%+ drag on the economy.
Surely a DRAM industry is cheap in comparison, plus it actually has a chance of paying off.
Yes?! Infineon's fabs and new SiC wafers aren't built for the small feature sizes of CPUs and GPUs.
Making power FETs uses different process nodes than CPUs and GPUs. All semi fabs are highly specialized: some for power ICs, some for RF, some for DRAM, some for logic, some for NAND.
Vacuum tubes have huge conduction losses, i.e. the voltage drop on them is very high at high electric currents.
This is why for high-power switching they were quickly replaced by gas-filled tubes, like thyratrons (General Electric) and ignitrons (Westinghouse Electric).
Semiconductor devices have much lower conduction losses than even gas-filled tubes.
While conduction losses are much less a problem with semiconductor switches, many of the semiconductor switches have high switching losses, which limit their use to low switching frequencies.
Silicon carbide devices have lower switching losses than the older semiconductor devices, and gallium nitride have even lower switching losses than SiC devices, so both enable great increases in switching frequencies, which has many benefits.
As a bonus, in the future (when SiC crystals with a better quality will be available) silicon carbide devices will enable the production of high-voltage switches that require much fewer devices connected in series to reach working voltages of hundreds of kilovolt, or even of a few megavolt.
Nowadays, thermionic vacuum tubes or thyratrons remain sometime competitive in pulse switching applications, but only for very high voltages, i.e. above 50 kV. Even for such applications they have a too short lifetime, and there are better semiconductor alternatives, except that the market is too niche so the big semiconductor device manufacturers do not bother to make such devices, which sometimes forces the use of obsolete vacuum tubes or thyratrons.
Only for the generation and amplification of electromagnetic waves in the microwave frequency range and at very high power, special vacuum tubes may remain preferable to semiconductor devices (e.g. the magnetrons of microwave ovens or the traveling-wave tubes still used in many satellites).
Wooooo let's go back to 1827 for a moment and have a chat with Anyos Jedlik. Or maybe Andres Flocken in 1881. Let's see how they did electric vehicles.
Point still stands - no vehicles electric or otherwise were using SiC until around the 1970s (and even then that was really niche applications) and widespread use wasn't until the 2010s.
Until then, we were predominantly using SiO2 MOSFETs and IGBTs.
You will note that timeline also maps quite well on when electric vehicles started to become viable in the market . Of course battery technology also had a lot to do with that, but efficient high voltage power electronics absolutely are an important part of the equation.
I mean sure, motor control existed before solid state switching devices, but it was also much lower efficiency and used much lower voltages. Power electronics absolutely are critical for the efficiencies and handling characteristics of modern electric propulsion.
I'm curious about RF uses (esp phased-array radar / AESA). usually GaN is treated as the the best for power/efficiency reasons, but does SiC enter into the picture? not fast enough?
The GaN itself is grown on SiC (instead of Si) for high performance RF, so SiC production capability matters if you want a homegrown supply chain (but you won't use SiC in the signal path itself). Many fabs are on 100mm or 150mm wafers trying to jump to 200mm ASAP.
That's all motherhood and apple pie, but to the GP's remark, why is this supposedly "a huge deal"?
In my mind, it's a process improvement towards cost-effective economies of scale, not a fundamental change in the end product. The PR also mentions Infineon will be "further executing on its 200-millimeter SiC manufacturing roadmap."
I mean nice milestone accomplishment, but are SiC products a major supply chain bottleneck, or can the market reasonable expect unit costs to be chopped in half any time soon?
For now, SiC MOSFETs remain more expensive than silicon IGBTs, even if the difference is today much smaller than a few years ago.
So at any new design, one must ponder whether to use the better SiC MOSFETs or the cheaper silicon IGBTs.
Even if they are more expensive, SiC MOSFETs ensure economies elsewhere, i.e. they enable a higher energy efficiency, which reduces the operational costs for the end user, and also the use of cheaper devices in other parts of the system, which can compensate the higher cost of the SiC devices.
So now any price reduction of the SiC devices is welcome, expanding the range of products for which they will be chosen, thus their market share. The price reduction from using wafers with a double area can be very substantial, not only due to producing a double number of devices with a not much greater cost, but also by improving the yields for large-area devices, because usually the chips that are located close to the edge of the wafer have worse yields.
There already are many recent electric vehicles that use SiC MOSFETs, inclusively from Tesla and this is a market that grows quickly and SiC MOSFETs are a critical component for it, by enabling much better efficiency, size and weight of the electronics, in comparison with the old IGBTs.
>You can likely live without a new gaming rig. You likely cannot live without replaceable parts for trucks and cars.
Bad logic for an argument. With this logic you can say you can live fine with your 30 year old diesel car that doesn't need these new cutting edge SiC wafer chips, and that making diesel engines is more important for national security than making chips, and so on and so forth till you reach knowing how to make fire.
Truth is fabbing CPUs and GPUs is miles more profitable than what Infineon and EU are fabbing, and they're just as important for national security/sovereignty:
Did Infineon's engineers use EU or US CPUs and GPUs for the complex CAD/CAE simulations needed to develop those SiC wafers? Why else do you think the US got TSMC and Samsung to make cutting edge fabs on US soil if CPUs and GPUs are not important for national security? When you need to process TB of live battlefield data in case of war, do you not need domestic CPUs and GPUs?
Ten years old CPUs are "okay" and there are fabs in Europe that could make them. Faster is better, but slower isn't entirely useless and hugely better than no CPU. Like a 100 hp heavy truck is greatly underpowered, but almost infinitely better than no truck.
There is an overlap between SiC and GaN at rated voltages between 600 V and 750 V, but at lower voltages than that only GaN devices are used and at higher voltages than that only SiC devices are used.
Even at 650 V where there are available both GaN and SiC devices, there is little direct competition between them. For such voltages, SiC devices are used for controlling greater powers, where also the power dissipated by the device is great enough to require a big package that enables efficient cooling, while the pure GaN devices (i.e. not the hybrid silicon-GaN cascode transistors) are available only in small surface mounted packages, which enable much higher switching frequencies, but at lower output powers, because it is more difficult to cool them well enough.
Different kind of applications. GaN has no reverse recovery at all and a way smaller gate source capacity and threshold voltage so you can crank up the frequency higher.
But GaN conducts heat worse and also anything that can withstand more than 650V becomes a huge die due to no vertical mosfet tech in GaN yet.
SiC is more or less like super Silicon, almost negligible reverse recovery, very fast switching, way smaller gate charge and a 1200V 1700V is economical and very performant.
For high power like 10s-100s of kW SiC is the best. Higher than that passive components become so big you don't need as high a frequency so you would go with Si IGBTs, lower than that GaN allows you to increase frequency by a lot and reduce passive components size AND in a lot of cases total losses.
So yeah, don't expect to see GaN in a car power train and SiC in a server power supply.
Wolfspeed/Cree does not have a fab and does not create wafers, let alone LEDs. They are purely a research/licensing company with a side business of selling luminaire fixtures.
Wolfspeed just barely started making anything. Their plant only broke ground recently in 2023, and they did not have anything fabrication-wise going when they first broke off from Cree in 2021.
Wolfspeed didn't break off from Cree, the Cree name was sold off as they moved away from LEDs and became pure SiC/compound semiconductors.
The Marcy fab has been in HVM since mid 2023. Prior to that they had a large 150mm fab in North Carolina since at least 2016. Unless you are referring specifically to 300mm SiC?
Anyone know why it took so long for them to transition to 300mm? As mentioned in the article, they're mainly using existing 300mm equipment designed for silicon, which transitioned years ago. I imagine some process steps are different (mainly growing to larger boule, but probably others), but it doesn't seem like they would be huge blockers.
did anyone say anything about larger die? I think this is a more-die play, so a given defect density won't affect yield. (maybe a small improvement due to less circumference for given area.)
Not really. The article is about a larger wafer, not larger dies.
They are mostly cutting transistors, voltage regulators, and such out of those. There's already no practical limitation on the size of those components.
While this is not the principal reason for using bigger wafers, bigger wafers reduce the cost of large-area devices more than they reduce the cost of small-area devices.
As you say, the main reason for using a wafer with a double area is to double the number of transistors that can be made on a wafer, reducing their fabrication cost.
Nonetheless, the reduction in fabrication cost is greater for large-area devices, for 2 reasons.
One is that on bigger wafers less area is wasted at the periphery, where in many places a full die does not fit inside the circle, so an area corresponding with a fraction of a die remains unused. The amount of such wasted area grows quickly with the size of the die.
The second reason is that the dies that are close to the wafer edge, even if they fit inside they have worse yields than the dies that are far from the edge. Again, the proportion of such dies with worse yields increases with the die size and it is lower for bigger wafers.
I did my PhD in a SiC lab, working in a tangential topic but in that lab, so I heard a lot about SiC. My take away was that the similarities and transferable aspects of silicon and silicon carbide is that they share the same first seven letters, after that all bets are off. It’s a nightmare of a material to work with.
What surprises me with Infineon is that they seem to not work on a LLM on a chip. In particular that here in Linz Infineon, Apple's 5G modem designer and the Johannes Kepler University with Sepp Hochreiter (Inventor of LSTM) are just next to each other.
I watched a interview of Infineon head of AI just recently, and I was like excited to hear about some cool hardware. And all he did is talk about how he uses LLMs.
Yeah sadly. I think they have all the know how and people and connections to pull that off. Yet as so often, Austrian (Linz) companies are all about being a supplier not a disrupter.
Infineon has these weird automotive tricore microprocessors. Going into consumer market it would be expensive and not competitive. Infineon tried that with XMC microprocessors, but they weren’t cheap, had thermal issues and weren’t well received by customers.
Someone needs to still keep making the "literally everything else" chips in the world. I'd rather it be an old name like Infineon instead of them handing their entire business to China in favor of chasing a bubble.
Going into something so far out of their expertise would be (rightfully?) punished by the market. That kind of innovation is more likely to succeed in a startup than in a traditional lifestyle company like Infineon.
Does somebody work on combining flash storage technology with analog computers? After all, a flash storage cell is "just" a FET, so in theory it should be possible to use the cell directly as a weight of an input to some summing amplifier. In other words combine some kind of opamp with a bunch of flash cells to make up one artificial neuron. Should massively increase density and energy efficiency compared to traditional digital stuff. And slight inaccuracies of analog circuits won't matter that much in artifcial neural networks. AFAIU.
69 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadInfineon marks innovation milestone with world’s first 300-millimeter power silicon carbide (SiC) wafer
PBusiness & Financial Press Nov 09, 2026
Infineon presents industry-first functional power devices processed on 300-millimeter silicon carbide wafers
Technological breakthrough underlines Infineon’s innovation strength and leadership in power semiconductors and wide-bandgap technologies
300-millimeter SiC process feasibility lays the foundation for secure, future-proof SiC supply to customers in automotive, renewable energy, industrial and AI data center applications
Infineon will present the first processed 300-millimeter SiC wafer to the public at the electronica trade show starting 10 November 2026 in Munich
Sure, cartel behavior is illegal, but if you're in bed with the right political administrations, then eyes get closed.
When Korean and American factories ramp up, the price will plummet. Basically whatever business will not make a single Euro profit for years.
European silicon manufacturers target industrial and automotive for a reason. They want large, guaranteed contracts for older silicon nodes which are cheap and profitable. They let the US, China and Taiwan to take risk of developing new ones. When they do research, they prefer incremental ones.
When it comes to real talk Europe doesn't really care about independence more than it cares about capital and profits. Only an actual war will make the governments care and it will be too late. Without a strong drive to create one's own nuclear arsenal, don't expect any groundbreaking risky investment out Europe.
I mean, they must be aware of the basic facts: if you're making weapons of war best possible outcome is they sit unused in a basement. If they are used, the other guy's weapons will be going in the other direction and your weapons will not just not contribute to the economy, they'll literally have very strong negative contributions. Whichever of the 2 situations you're in, there will be no improvement for the population, no economic growth beyond the initial investment, no nothing.
For the governments buying the weapons this is a guaranteed zero-return-on-investment, with loaned money. Does it really need explaining how stupid this is from a financial viewpoint? In a few years this will become a drag on the EU economy of something like 10% of all taxes raised in the EU. And that's assuming they aren't actually used for anything, because then it'll be a 50%+ drag on the economy.
Surely a DRAM industry is cheap in comparison, plus it actually has a chance of paying off.
You can likely live without a new gaming rig. You likely cannot live without replaceable parts for trucks and cars.
Making power FETs uses different process nodes than CPUs and GPUs. All semi fabs are highly specialized: some for power ICs, some for RF, some for DRAM, some for logic, some for NAND.
Now SiC MOSFETs are the most efficient devices for the power converters used in electric vehicles.
This is why for high-power switching they were quickly replaced by gas-filled tubes, like thyratrons (General Electric) and ignitrons (Westinghouse Electric).
Semiconductor devices have much lower conduction losses than even gas-filled tubes.
While conduction losses are much less a problem with semiconductor switches, many of the semiconductor switches have high switching losses, which limit their use to low switching frequencies.
Silicon carbide devices have lower switching losses than the older semiconductor devices, and gallium nitride have even lower switching losses than SiC devices, so both enable great increases in switching frequencies, which has many benefits.
As a bonus, in the future (when SiC crystals with a better quality will be available) silicon carbide devices will enable the production of high-voltage switches that require much fewer devices connected in series to reach working voltages of hundreds of kilovolt, or even of a few megavolt.
Nowadays, thermionic vacuum tubes or thyratrons remain sometime competitive in pulse switching applications, but only for very high voltages, i.e. above 50 kV. Even for such applications they have a too short lifetime, and there are better semiconductor alternatives, except that the market is too niche so the big semiconductor device manufacturers do not bother to make such devices, which sometimes forces the use of obsolete vacuum tubes or thyratrons.
Only for the generation and amplification of electromagnetic waves in the microwave frequency range and at very high power, special vacuum tubes may remain preferable to semiconductor devices (e.g. the magnetrons of microwave ovens or the traveling-wave tubes still used in many satellites).
Wooooo let's go back to 1827 for a moment and have a chat with Anyos Jedlik. Or maybe Andres Flocken in 1881. Let's see how they did electric vehicles.
Oh, lookie there, no SiC.
Until then, we were predominantly using SiO2 MOSFETs and IGBTs.
I would not say electric cars "worked fine" until pretty recently.
In my mind, it's a process improvement towards cost-effective economies of scale, not a fundamental change in the end product. The PR also mentions Infineon will be "further executing on its 200-millimeter SiC manufacturing roadmap."
I mean nice milestone accomplishment, but are SiC products a major supply chain bottleneck, or can the market reasonable expect unit costs to be chopped in half any time soon?
So at any new design, one must ponder whether to use the better SiC MOSFETs or the cheaper silicon IGBTs.
Even if they are more expensive, SiC MOSFETs ensure economies elsewhere, i.e. they enable a higher energy efficiency, which reduces the operational costs for the end user, and also the use of cheaper devices in other parts of the system, which can compensate the higher cost of the SiC devices.
So now any price reduction of the SiC devices is welcome, expanding the range of products for which they will be chosen, thus their market share. The price reduction from using wafers with a double area can be very substantial, not only due to producing a double number of devices with a not much greater cost, but also by improving the yields for large-area devices, because usually the chips that are located close to the edge of the wafer have worse yields.
There already are many recent electric vehicles that use SiC MOSFETs, inclusively from Tesla and this is a market that grows quickly and SiC MOSFETs are a critical component for it, by enabling much better efficiency, size and weight of the electronics, in comparison with the old IGBTs.
Bad logic for an argument. With this logic you can say you can live fine with your 30 year old diesel car that doesn't need these new cutting edge SiC wafer chips, and that making diesel engines is more important for national security than making chips, and so on and so forth till you reach knowing how to make fire.
Truth is fabbing CPUs and GPUs is miles more profitable than what Infineon and EU are fabbing, and they're just as important for national security/sovereignty:
Did Infineon's engineers use EU or US CPUs and GPUs for the complex CAD/CAE simulations needed to develop those SiC wafers? Why else do you think the US got TSMC and Samsung to make cutting edge fabs on US soil if CPUs and GPUs are not important for national security? When you need to process TB of live battlefield data in case of war, do you not need domestic CPUs and GPUs?
Even at 650 V where there are available both GaN and SiC devices, there is little direct competition between them. For such voltages, SiC devices are used for controlling greater powers, where also the power dissipated by the device is great enough to require a big package that enables efficient cooling, while the pure GaN devices (i.e. not the hybrid silicon-GaN cascode transistors) are available only in small surface mounted packages, which enable much higher switching frequencies, but at lower output powers, because it is more difficult to cool them well enough.
But GaN conducts heat worse and also anything that can withstand more than 650V becomes a huge die due to no vertical mosfet tech in GaN yet.
SiC is more or less like super Silicon, almost negligible reverse recovery, very fast switching, way smaller gate charge and a 1200V 1700V is economical and very performant.
For high power like 10s-100s of kW SiC is the best. Higher than that passive components become so big you don't need as high a frequency so you would go with Si IGBTs, lower than that GaN allows you to increase frequency by a lot and reduce passive components size AND in a lot of cases total losses.
So yeah, don't expect to see GaN in a car power train and SiC in a server power supply.
I know this because I was there.
The Marcy fab has been in HVM since mid 2023. Prior to that they had a large 150mm fab in North Carolina since at least 2016. Unless you are referring specifically to 300mm SiC?
Chasing 9’s is very hard already (both uptime and purity), and by the time you start getting into 6+ digits of 9’s? Really really hard.
They are mostly cutting transistors, voltage regulators, and such out of those. There's already no practical limitation on the size of those components.
While this is not the principal reason for using bigger wafers, bigger wafers reduce the cost of large-area devices more than they reduce the cost of small-area devices.
Nonetheless, the reduction in fabrication cost is greater for large-area devices, for 2 reasons.
One is that on bigger wafers less area is wasted at the periphery, where in many places a full die does not fit inside the circle, so an area corresponding with a fraction of a die remains unused. The amount of such wasted area grows quickly with the size of the die.
The second reason is that the dies that are close to the wafer edge, even if they fit inside they have worse yields than the dies that are far from the edge. Again, the proportion of such dies with worse yields increases with the die size and it is lower for bigger wafers.
Scaling this up does not appear to be trivial.
CVD and the "Lely" process are also mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide#Production
Growing the crystals is very slow, so you have a lot more time within which to make a mistake per wafer.
Those are key components in the shift to renewable power. Inverters for solar, motors, battery chargers, even inverter based power transformers.