Taisic grows 300mm SiC boule on local furnace

Taisic Materials has produced a 12-inch silicon carbide boule using a crystal-growth furnace developed by Kenmec Mechanical Engineering, extending the Taiwanese company’s large-diameter SiC work beyond the 8-inch products currently shown in its commercial materials portfolio.

The development combines two parts of the manufacturing chain inside the same industrial group. Taisic produces SiC ingots and substrates, while Kenmec has developed crystal-growth equipment intended to support that materials operation. Successfully growing a 300mm boule therefore tests both the furnace platform and Taisic’s control of the crystal-growth process at a diameter substantially larger than today’s mainstream SiC wafer formats.

The precise national-priority claim needs qualification. Current reporting describes the Taisic result as Taiwan’s first 12-inch SiC boule, but Yongquan Wafers publicly stated in April 2025 that it had already produced a 12-inch SiC puck in Taiwan with a thickness exceeding 11mm. The stronger, verifiable description of the latest development is consequently Taisic’s successful 300mm growth using Kenmec’s domestically developed furnace rather than an undisputed first for the country.

Taisic was founded in 2020 to manufacture upstream silicon-carbide materials and has previously described in-house capability covering seed material, raw-material preparation, crystal-state control, defect analysis, and electrical-property adjustment. Its current product pages list 8-inch N-type SiC ingots and substrates alongside smaller semi-insulating material, illustrating the distance between an experimental 300mm growth result and a fully qualified commercial wafer product.

That distinction is important in SiC. A boule is the bulk single-crystal material from which wafers can eventually be cut, ground, polished, inspected, and prepared for epitaxial growth or other downstream processing. Increasing crystal diameter does not automatically demonstrate that production wafers can be manufactured at acceptable defect density, flatness, thickness variation, mechanical yield, and cost.

The attraction of 300mm is straightforward at manufacturing level. A larger wafer provides considerably more usable surface area than a 200mm substrate and brings SiC closer to the equipment format used across much of the high-volume silicon semiconductor industry. In principle, that can improve manufacturing economics if crystal quality, wafer yield, process uniformity, and tool utilisation remain sufficiently high.

Those conditions are doing a great deal of work. Silicon carbide crystal growth is materially more difficult than producing large-diameter silicon, while defects generated during crystal growth can propagate through wafer processing and device fabrication. Increasing the boule diameter therefore magnifies requirements around thermal-field control, stress, temperature uniformity, material purity, and the stability of the growth equipment.

The industry is nonetheless pushing 300mm SiC through several different routes. Wolfspeed produced a single-crystal 300mm SiC wafer earlier this year, while Coherent has since progressed its own 300mm high-thermal-conductivity substrates into customer sampling for AI and high-performance-computing packaging applications.

Coherent’s recent move into 300mm customer sampling illustrates the next qualification stage beyond an internal materials demonstration. Customers have to determine whether thermal, mechanical, surface, and integration performance remain consistent across the larger substrate before there is a credible route towards production.

Power electronics remains another established reason for pushing SiC manufacturing scale. The material’s wide bandgap, high critical electric field, and thermal characteristics support high-voltage devices used in electric vehicles, charging systems, industrial power conversion, renewable-energy equipment, and other applications where switching efficiency and operating temperature matter. Larger wafer formats potentially spread fixed processing costs across more devices, although that benefit disappears quickly if defect density or wafer breakage undermines usable yield.

There is also a growing distinction between conductive SiC intended for power devices and high-purity or semi-insulating material used for RF, photonics, thermal management, and advanced packaging. Taisic already lists both N-type and semi-insulating products, so proving control at 300mm could ultimately have implications beyond a single power-semiconductor substrate line.

No timetable has yet been disclosed for slicing the latest boule into qualified 300mm wafers, customer sampling, epitaxial processing, or volume production. Nor has Taisic published detailed defect-density, resistivity, thickness, or crystallographic data for the new material. Those are the measurements that will determine whether the diameter milestone develops into a manufacturing platform.

For now, the more significant element is the integration of crystal-growth equipment and substrate development inside the Kenmec group. Growing a 300mm boule proves that the furnace and materials process can reach the target diameter; turning that crystal into repeatable semiconductor-grade wafers remains the considerably less photogenic part of the job.