The fact that 200mm required 500um thick substrates has been known for quite a while.
Infineon said it is the thickness that is the issue and implied Wolfspeed needs more than marketing to make it work.
seekingalpha.com
Jochen Hanebeck
Yes. Thank you, Andreas, and I'm happy to take the silicon carbide question. So first of all, transition to 200-millimeter will happen. We expect a time frame from today's perspective, maybe two to four years, but it comes when it makes sense. And what many people forget is that at the beginning, yields for 200-millimeter will be lower from the boule growth also to the processing. And don't forget also 200-millimeter wafers will be thicker, right? The standard thickness is 500 micrometers as compared to 350. So the gain on the area of 1.78 you lose on the thickness by 1.42. And ultimately, this transition to eight-inch is -- or 200 millimeters is only a cost topic. So it will come, but it will come when the cost equation makes sense and not when the marketing argument is out there.
China, indeed, we believe that it's a positive argument for our Chinese customers to be served with Chinese substrate source. And there might be also some other customers in the -- outside China which are happy to take this source. For us, it's multisource, multi-country, again, establishing, nurturing the merchant substrate and boule market, which is the base of our strategic thinking that differentiation is moving away from boule and substrate and towards device and package and application know-how. This is where the music will play in the future in silicon carbide.
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