Infineon Technologies has signed a multi-year agreement with Wolfspeed to secure supplies of 200mm silicon carbide wafers, eeNews Europe reports. The deal shifts an existing relationship from 150mm to 200mm substrates and extends a partnership that runs back two decades.
The shift to larger wafers matters because silicon carbide dies are expensive per unit area, and moving from 150mm to 200mm yields roughly 1.8 times as many usable die from the same equipment. That is the single biggest lever on SiC cost, which has kept the technology confined to premium vehicles and high-end power supplies.
Demand is being pulled from several directions at once. Electric vehicles remain the anchor market, but AI data centers have added a new load as power delivery architectures move to higher voltages and lower losses, and renewable energy inverters continue to scale.
For Infineon, the agreement is a hedge against substrate scarcity. SiC wafer supply has been the bottleneck in the industry for years, with a small number of suppliers controlling most of the crystalline growth capacity.
Wolfspeed benefits from a committed buyer at a moment when it has been working to stabilize its own balance sheet and fill capacity at its 200mm plants. The company received a conditional $1.5B loan commitment from the US Department of War earlier in October.
Financial terms of the Infineon agreement were not disclosed.
