The world's largest SiC epitaxial wafer manufacturer has signed two contracts to compete for the production capacity of third-generation semiconductors.

Showa Electric announced on the 28th that it has signed a long-term contract with Toshiba for the supply of SiC (silicon carbide) epitaxial wafers for a period of 2.5 years. It is worth mentioning that Showa Electric is the world's largest supplier of SiC epitaxial wafers. On the 13th of this month, the company also signed a multi-year supply contract with Roma for the supply of SiC epitaxial wafers.

According to incomplete statistics of Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, since August, a number of international leading enterprises have focused on SiC, to ensure production capacity by signing long-term contracts, investment, production expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and so on, and the battle for production capacity has been ignited.

How important is capacity? At present, the annual production capacity of global SiC wafers is about 40-600000 wafers, which is far from meeting the downstream demand, and the supply side has become one of the key constraints of SiC.

While the supply is tight, downstream applications are growing rapidly.

The first to bear the brunt is the electric car. The data show that after adopting SiC technology, the energy loss of new energy vehicles is reduced by about 5 times, the efficiency of motor inverters can be increased by 4%, and the vehicle mileage increases by 7%. Therefore, the leader Tesla took the lead, and its Model 3 model was equipped with an inverter with 24 SiC-MOSFET as power modules, while BYD, Xilai and Geely also began to layout. Zhongtai Securities believes that this year, the automotive sector SiC is expected to enter the first year of volume.

In addition, photovoltaic is also regarded as a potential application scenario of SiC, and the use of SiC technology can effectively increase solar energy conversion efficiency. Last year, photovoltaic accounted for only 10% of SiC devices, and analysts are still optimistic about its permeability improvement. The IEA of the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2024, if only 2 per cent of distributed solar photovoltaic systems deploy SiC, the additional generating capacity will be as much as 10GW.

At present, the main bottleneck of SiC penetration is that the cost is too high. However, according to CASA statistics, the price of SiC has declined rapidly in recent years, falling by more than 50% in 2020 compared with 2017, and the price gap with silicon devices is further narrowed, which is expected to accelerate the popularity. Infineon expects SiC semiconductors to grow at an annual rate of 30 per cent and 40 per cent over the next five years.

At present, many manufacturers of layout SiC have emerged in China, including:

The annual production capacity of the third-generation semiconductor substrate of San'an Optoelectronics is planned to be about 36000; Lou Xiao Technology expects that the first phase of the SiC project will be shipped in small quantities by the end of September; North Huachuang, Huarun Micro, Wentai Technology, Yangjie Technology and so on have entered the Bureau one after another.

In addition, Tianyue Advanced Science and Technology Innovation Board IPO, a manufacturer of SiC substrates, successfully passed the meeting on September 9; the 100000-piece SiC project of Tongguang Crystal was put into production last week, and the company plans to go public on the internal medicine pioneering board in one year; Tianke Hedda is also in the listing application stage.