For decades, we heard silicon was the only answer. However, while the world’s largest fabs were busy taping out silicon, the communities of engineers and scientists working on non-silicon technologies continued pushing forward. Compound semiconductors—semiconductors made from two or more periodic table elements—include indium phosphide (InP), silicon nitride (SiN), gallium arsenide (GaAs), germanium (Ge), indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), cadmium telluride (CdTe), gallium nitride (GaN), and silicon carbide (SiC).
Once Tesla introduced SiC MOSFETs in its EVs in 2018, SiC would no longer go unnoticed. The market has grown to more than $2.5 billion in 2024, and despite the temporary slowdown in 2025, is expected to continue growing at a staggering pace according to Yole and TrendForce.
Most EV electronics suppliers now offer SiC power ICs, creating a new ecosystem of material suppliers, capital equipment, fabless companies, foundries, and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) service suppliers.
Some integrated device manufacturers (IDMs)—including Bosch, Denso, Infineon, onsemi, Rohm, SanAn, STMicroelectronics, and Wolfspeed—went fully vertical starting with the SiC powder and ending with multi-die power modules.
Figure 1 SiC’s bubble size indicates its manufacturing volume and annual growth. Source: Author
Many newcomers got into the substrate business because of the high cost of the raw material. They invested heavily in mergers and acquisitions and organic growth and are now faced with the challenge of returning investment to shareholders. In this highly competitive environment, manufacturers are pushed to new levels in yield, quality, efficiency, and capacity.
Benefits are costly
SiC offers benefits to designers and consumers. Thanks to the material properties, SiC transistors can be operated at much higher voltages with lower resistance, showing less performance degradation with temperature, making SiC electronics appealing for power conversion and charging applications in vehicles and power grid applications.
However, the raw material is substantially more expensive than silicon. Crystal growth is orders of magnitude slower than silicon—its hardness, second only to diamond, makes it hard to slice, polish, and dice. High operating voltages require thick epitaxial layers that exhibit high defectivity. Next, vertical transistor architecture requires substantial wafer backside processing. All this translates to higher defectivity and lower yield with frequent yield excursions.
To the consumer, it’s higher product cost and lower reliability in the field.
Years behind silicon
“SiC is decades behind silicon,” is the common cliché among manufacturers. Here, the dominant wafer size is a good indication of material platform maturity. Historically, as silicon manufacturing matured, the industry transitioned to a larger wafer size, going through 100-, 150-, 200- and 300-millimeter (mm) wafers over the four decades, as shown in the figure below.
Figure 2 Most of the high-volume manufacturing capacity for SiCs is expected to remain on 150-mm wafers. Source: Author
Presently, SiC is made predominantly on 150-mm substrates. Meanwhile, several companies announced a transition to 200-mm substrates. While Chinese substrate supplier SICC demonstrated 300-mm substrate in 2024, use of such a large substrate is beyond the horizon. In the next several years, most of the capacity is expected to remain on 150-mm wafers.
Yes, SiC is 30 years behind silicon, judging by the substrate sizes in volume manufacturing.
Complexity of SiC circuits resembles silicon chips in the 1980s—integration into complex circuits today is at the package level rather than on a monolithic IC as seen in silicon. While the most complex silicon ICs count billions of transistors, SiC ICs are nowhere near such complexity. The reason is simple—die yield scales exponentially with the die area. At high defectivity levels, this becomes detrimental, and the only answer is going with a smaller die, integrating known good die at the package level into a more complex circuit.
However, while SiC seems decades behind silicon, it does not need decades to catch up.
The big data platform
Methodologies developed over the decades in silicon IC manufacturing are now available. One example is a solution that deploys data analytics for silicon utilized to streamline innovation. The benefits are numerous:
- Breaking the silos: The technology cycle from IC design to high-volume manufacturing is long with many players and data silos across operations. That’s where end-to-end big data platforms can connect all data end-to-end and make it available to a broad range of functions.
- Smart factory: Front-end factories are different from their predecessors. Today’s manufacturing ecosystem offers a variety of software capabilities from dozens of suppliers with well-established interoperability.
- Standardization: Thanks to several organizations—including SEMI, Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA), and Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)—there is a broad landscape of industry standards covering everything from equipment connectivity to data formats and specifications. Standards enable better interoperability between tools and suppliers, streamlining equipment and software deployments to support yield ramps.
- Material traceability: Whether the need is for tracing wafers in a fab or die in an assembly line, the task is complex and ranges from multiple substrate IDs and rework at different steps to substrate grading to cherry-picking. In an assembly line, it’s a challenge solved with traceability standards.
- Data models: A data model details material data, inline data from the fabs, and assembly and test data from OSATs. It describes physical entities such as equipment, wafers, dies and modules, processes including fab, assembly and test, and their relationships in the context of manufacturing flow.
- Artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML): Decades ago, scientists had to develop analytical relationships between causes and effects, while software developers came up with software specifications. A myriad of data-centric frameworks and the ubiquity of AI/ML now shorten this cycle, eliminating numerous bottlenecks.
- Too much data: Vast amounts of data are generated per wafer throughout the manufacturing operations, though most of that data is never used. At the same time, engineers in the automotive segment are putting more stringent requirements on their chip and module suppliers regarding data collection and retention. The data platform must enable a good mix of storage options allowing tradeoffs between performance and cost and provide the knobs for data caching and aging.
Adopting an industry-standard solution allows manufacturers to improve efficiency and ramp yields faster than the competition.
What’s next
According to Yole, TrendForce, McKinsey and SEMI, growth is forecasted for most compound semiconductor devices, with silicon carbide at the top of that list. Following Gartner’s terminology of the “hype cycle,” it’s past disillusionment. Both silicon and GaN have been carving out more space in the power IC market. This change will push SiC for performance and cost.
At the same time, more suppliers are stepping into the market in each segment—material suppliers, foundries, fabless and IDMs. Competition will intensify, pushing manufacturers for higher yields, faster development cycles, and higher levels of integration.
Under pressure for cost and performance, designers and manufacturers must start adopting big data platforms.
Steve Zamek, director of product management at PDF Solutions Inc., is responsible for manufacturing data analytics solutions for foundries and IDMs. Prior to this, he was with KLA (former KLA-Tencor), where he led advanced technologies in imaging systems, image sensors, and advanced packaging.
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