AFAIK, they do power and analog stuff and digital logic for automotive and industry, not cutting edge digital logic at the smallest feature sizes.

Does somebody work on combining flash storage technology with analog computers? After all, a flash storage cell is "just" a FET, so in theory it should be possible to use the cell directly as a weight of an input to some summing amplifier. In other words combine some kind of opamp with a bunch of flash cells to make up one artificial neuron. Should massively increase density and energy efficiency compared to traditional digital stuff. And slight inaccuracies of analog circuits won't matter that much in artifcial neural networks. AFAIU.

Someone needs to still keep making the "literally everything else" chips in the world. I'd rather it be an old name like Infineon instead of them handing their entire business to China in favor of chasing a bubble.

Why would they? Their bread and butter is power electronics. Those big GPU clusters need dozens if not hundreds of heavy duty GaN/SiC FETs.

Going into something so far out of their expertise would be (rightfully?) punished by the market. That kind of innovation is more likely to succeed in a startup than in a traditional lifestyle company like Infineon.

Their black magic is a different breed.

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>You can likely live without a new gaming rig. You likely cannot live without replaceable parts for trucks and cars.

Bad logic for an argument. With this logic you can say you can live fine with your 30 year old diesel car that doesn't need these new cutting edge SiC wafer chips, and that making diesel engines is more important for national security than making chips, and so on and so forth till you reach knowing how to make fire, swords an arrows as the most important for national security.

Truth is fabbing CPUs and GPUs is miles more profitable than what Infineon and EU are fabbing, and they're just as important for national security/sovereignty if not even more:

Did Infineon's engineers use EU or US CPUs and GPUs for the complex CAD/CAE simulations needed to develop those SiC wafers? Why else do you think the US got TSMC and Samsung to make cutting edge fabs on US soil if CPUs and GPUs are not important for national security? When you need to process TB of live battlefield data in case of war, do you not need domestic CPUs and GPUs?

Trucks and cars worked fine without them for decades

That's a funny way to frame things. Do you think Infineon is forced to choose between those two markets?

Making a SiC crystal that's 300mm large is much more difficult than silicon. SiC can't use the Cz process that silicon uses for one. SiC doesn't even melt at normal temperatures. This is great for thermals but bad if you want to use molten phase techniques.

From the wiki, SiC monocrystals are made in an "Acheson graphite electric resistance furnace."

Scaling this up does not appear to be trivial.

CVD and the "Lely" process are also mentioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide#Production

Larger dies == more material == more chance for impurities to wreck the crystal.

Chasing 9’s is very hard already (both uptime and purity), and by the time you start getting into 6+ digits of 9’s? Really really hard.

SiC is just in general an extremely unforgiving material to work with. The stars just didn't align for 300mm wafers until now.

I did my PhD in a SiC lab, working in a tangential topic but in that lab, so I heard a lot about SiC. My take away was that the similarities and transferable aspects of silicon and silicon carbide is that they share the same first seven letters, after that all bets are off. It’s a nightmare of a material to work with.

It's about temperature gradients forming over a much larger surface. You've got 2.4x more area to worry about at 300mm.

Growing the crystals is very slow, so you have a lot more time within which to make a mistake per wafer.

European investors and governments are risk averse. DRAM is one of the riskiest silicon products. They talk a lot about independence but European governments lack the raw investment power and willpower to make decade-long investments that are guaranteed to lose money in the next decade as DRAM. If Europe wants DRAM made in European soil, the governments and people should be ready for losing tens to hundreds of billions of taxpayer money.

When Korean and American factories ramp up, the price will plummet. Basically whatever business will not make a single Euro profit for years.

European silicon manufacturers target industrial and automotive for a reason. They want large, guaranteed contracts for older silicon nodes which are cheap and profitable. They let the US, China and Taiwan to take risk of developing new ones. When they do research, they prefer incremental ones.

When it comes to real talk Europe doesn't really care about independence more than it cares about capital and profits. Only an actual war will make the governments care and it will be too late. Without a strong drive to create one's own nuclear arsenal, don't expect any groundbreaking risky investment out Europe.

In a few years dram will be a losing money segment again, why bother?

Memory packaging is non-trivial and Europe currently doesn't have players in that space.

The primary players are South Korea, Taiwan, the US, and China and most of their capex in the space is in Asia and the US.

Different kind of applications. GaN has no reverse recovery at all and a way smaller gate source capacity and threshold voltage so you can crank up the frequency higher.

But GaN conducts heat worse and also anything that can withstand more than 650V becomes a huge die due to no vertical mosfet tech in GaN yet.

SiC is more or less like super Silicon, almost negligible reverse recovery, very fast switching, way smaller gate charge and a 1200V 1700V is economical and very performant.

For high power like 10s-100s of kW SiC is the best. Higher than that passive components become so big you don't need as high a frequency so you would go with Si IGBTs, lower than that GaN allows you to increase frequency by a lot and reduce passive components size AND in a lot of cases total losses.

So yeah, don't expect to see GaN in a car power train and SiC in a server power supply.

GaN is (much) better than SiC for certain FOMs, but worse in terms of thermal conduction and technology maturity. In addition, you can't yet make "vertical" GaN devices (there's a few flamed out startups that tried) which forces certain undesirable tradeoffs at high blocking voltages. So GaN's sweet spot is 100-650V devices, for 48V and mains voltage applications.

SiC is for high voltage, GaN is for high switching frequency.

I don't think they're claiming to be first in producing the substrate, just first to process it into functional power devices.

Wolfspeed/Cree does not have a fab and does not create wafers, let alone LEDs. They are purely a research/licensing company with a side business of selling luminaire fixtures.