Axiro invests in ThinSiC to expand silicon carbide portfolio - Manufacturing Today India

Axiro's capital injection into ThinSiC is not routine portfolio diversification—it is a targeted strike at the substrate thinning bottleneck that quietly governs SiC device economics. The profit center in the SiC value chain is migrating from crystal growth to precision machining. Wolfspeed's and Coherent's yield struggles during the 150mm-to-200mm transition expose a hard truth: thinning and polishing, not boule growth, are the true cost gates. If ThinSiC achieves stable sub-100μm thinning at volume, downstream MOSFET and SBD junction temperatures drop meaningfully, pulling the 800V EV and solar inverter breakeven curve forward by 12 to 18 months. Competitively, expect SiCrystal under ROHM and TanKeBlue to respond with capacity announcements within two quarters. STMicroelectronics, already deep in vertical integration, will likely internalize thinning as a proprietary step to lock in automotive design wins. The 12-to-24-month wildcard is not capacity—it is the micro-crack defect rate on 200mm wafers during aggressive thinning. Whoever cracks that reliability problem first captures pricing power for the next generation of power semiconductors. Axiro is betting on a narrow window before the field consolidates.