That makes a lot of sense when you consider the origins. After all, Infineon used to be a subsidiary of Siemens, a famously relatively conservative company
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
Scaling this up does not appear to be trivial.
CVD and the "Lely" process are also mentioned.
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.
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.
Sure, cartel behavior is illegal, but if you're in bed with the right political administrations, then blind eyes can be turned.
The primary players are South Korea, Taiwan, the US, and China and most of their capex in the space is in Asia and the US.
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.
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.
For now, the SiC devices are only unipolar devices, i.e. MOSFETs and Schottky diodes. But in the future, when SiC crystals with fewer defects will become available, there will also be SiC bipolar devices, i.e. thyristors and IGBTs. The bipolar devices will be available for much greater powers than the current devices, while also being much faster than the silicon bipolar devices. On GaN, bipolar devices are not possible, so GaN will always be used only for higher switching frequencies, but lower output powers than SiC.
Silicon carbide MOSFETs are the best devices for the SOTA electric vehicles and also for their chargers, which work at 800 V (where 1200 V SiC MOSFETs are used) or at 1000 V (where 1400 V SiC MOSFETs are used).
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, swords an arrows as the most important for national security.
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 if not even more:
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?
Yeah but in a war, be it a trade war or kinetic one, against a power WHO HAS modern chips and can process data and intelligence faster, who has better leverage? The one with cutting edge tech, or the one with "okay" tech?
Seeing how the orange bafoon slapped the EU around with his trade war and received no retaliation that could cause even paint in return, I assume the answer is obvious.
>and there are fabs in Europe that could make them.
Which EU fabs make 14++nm CPUs and GPUs? Which EU domestic CPUs and GPUs designs are there at the moment that can be fabbed in case of emergency without parts or IP from rivals?
The truth is EU is painfully absent from this field. Sure, in theory they can duct tape together some RISC-V CPU and some ARM MALI GPU production on Dresden 16nm fabs, in case of a war, but since the EU never built and shipped a commercial domestic CPU and GPU from scratch in the last 20+ years, it's not gonna be as easy as turning a screw, as it is for nations that ship new compute chips every year to consumers: US, Korea, Taiwan and to an extent Japan and China. When you've been out of the game for so long, you get rusty. EU would take decades to catch up and rebuild this industry in case of a war cut them off from these parts. It's basically another supply chain vulnerability it failed to address.
Now SiC MOSFETs are the most efficient devices for the power converters used in electric vehicles, where DC voltages of 800 V or 1000 V are used in the latest models, which require, respectively, 1200 V or 1400 V SiC MOSFETs.
GaN HEMTs (high-electron-mobility transistors) are the most efficient devices for the power supplies that are fed from mains electricity, where 650 V GaN devices are used for the universal power supplies, which must accept up to 240 V AC on input.
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.
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.