Wolfspeed introduces first 10kV SiC Power MOSFET
Wolfspeed has announced the industry's first commercially available 10 kV SiC power MOSFET, describing it as setting a new standard for durability and performance.
“This represents a historic leap in power electronics that will reshape how the world generates, distributes, and uses energy, unlocking the potential for modernisation and more efficient power conversion," said Subhashish Bhattacharya, Duke Energy distinguished professor at North Carolina State University.
"The timing of Wolfspeed's commercialisation could not be better. The world is racing to connect AI data centres to the grid, and this will be the enabling technology for future generations of solid-state transformers at that critical grid interface.”
The intrinsic time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) lifetime analysis predicts 158,000 years of operation at continuous 20 V gate bias voltage. As the first in the industry to solve bipolar degradation of 10 kV SiC MOSFETs, the device maintains reliable performance including body diode usage — essential for mid-voltage UPS systems, wind power, and solid-state transformer application.
SiC technology at 10 kV enables design flexibility that was not possible before, according to Wolfspeed, delivering a step function improvement in system’s size, weight, reliability, and cost of ownership.
This includes cutting system cost by approximately 30 percent by enabling simpler system architectures consolidating multi-cell designs into fewer cells and downsizing three-level inverters to a two-level topology. Another benefit is improving power density by more than 300 percent thanks to increasing switching frequencies from 600 Hz to 10,000 Hz, which simplifies control and gate drive circuitry, while also shrinking magnetics. Moreover, achieving 99 percent conversion efficiency enables simpler and more efficient thermal management compared to silicon IGBT-based systems, according to the company.
With a faster rise time of less than 10 nanoseconds, the new technology enables the replacement of conventional mechanical spark-gap switches — which degrade over time due to high-current, extremely high-temperature arcing that drives up maintenance costs and total cost of ownership — with SiC MOSFET-based solid-state switches.
These solid-state devices eliminate arcing, enable efficient energy transfer, and improve timing precision of pulsed power transfer, while also reducing size and system complexity for high-performance pulsed-power applications including geothermal power, power generation for AI data centres, semiconductor plasma etching, and sustainable fertiliser production.
“This milestone is a culmination of nearly 30 years of vertically integrated crystal growth, thick epitaxy, and high voltage device manufacturing excellence,” said Cengiz Balkas, Wolfspeed chief business officer. “The commercialisation of 10 kV MOSFETs enables our customers who have been prototyping at this voltage to transition their designs to production, accelerating time to market. We're not just ushering in a new era for high-voltage SiC - we're making it real.”
The 10 kV CPM3-10000-0300A SiC MOSFET die is available now for customer sampling and qualification.
