Clas-SiC: A thriving three-pronged attack

The Scottish SiC specialist is excelling on the three fronts – alongside rising demand for prototyping, the manufacture of SiC devices at low-to-medium volumes is on the up, and the licensing side of the business is booming

RICHARD STEVENSON, EDITOR OF CS MAGAZINE, INTERVIEWS JEN WALLS, CEO OF CLAS-SIC WAFER FAB

RS: What’s your view on the current state of play in the SiC industry?

JW: It’s changed a lot in the last 12 to 18 months. The number of players coming into the market has driven costs down, because capacity has been there. This has opened up new markets.

The cost of the substrate has reduced, bolstered by Chinese government subsidies. There has also been dramatic increases in quality for substrates, epitaxy, device performance and reliability.

Devices are more readily available than they were even a couple of years ago. Voltages are being pushed up in more applications, because device performance has increased. This wouldn’t have happened before, because silicon carbide was so expensive.

Price reductions have opened up markets for silicon carbide where it would not have played before, especially at lower voltages. Silicon carbide can now compete in consumer products, where GaN may have been the device of choice. Some of our customers are supplying makers of consumer products, like LG. That’s been a huge change.

RS: A great deal of excitement in SiC has come from the EV market, which is suffering from some softness. Do you think that’s a big issue?

JW: The compound annual growth rate of the EV market hasn’t been at the levels suggested by Yole Group and all the other market predictors. However, it’s growing. You can see that yourself – you can see more EVs on the road.

Here at Clas-SiC, our customers aren’t solely based on the EV market. I think the EV market is an absolute enabler to drive quality and device performance, but it’s not all about the EV market.

Silicon carbide is now seen as a major enabler for data centres. The power systems for large data centres needed for the future of AI are going to need silicon carbide.

RS: When Clas-SiC founded in 2017, I’d argue that the world was a different place. While co-operation still exists, there’s a move away from global supply chains towards sovereign capability. And there’s also the rise in vertical integration. How do these trends impact the progress of Clas-SiC?

JW: Sovereign capability and silicon carbide supply chains are great opportunities for Clas-SiC.

We are licencing our technology to SiCSem, to build a fab in India for India. India’s sovereign capability is driving that. It’s an extremely high-profile project for the Indian government. This will be the first time that they have backed a compound semiconductor fab to this level.

Clas-SiC benefits, not just through the licence fee and the royalty payments, but through the capacity we will get in that fab. Part of the agreement is that we get 15 percent capacity in that high-volume fab. We access high-volume, lower-cost production, but without the associated CapEx.

It’s very similar to the model we’ve already carried out in China. The Chinese fab is now up and running. It’s qualified for diodes and it’s going through MOSFET qualification.