Power Semiconductor Materials: Resonac's 12-Inch SiC Substrate

2026-09-29

On September 15, 2026, Japanese semiconductor materials maker Resonac Holdings announced it had successfully fabricated a 300 mm (12-inch) silicon carbide single crystal and completed substrate processing, becoming the first company in Japan to achieve this size.

12 inches is currently the largest diameter in the SiC substrate field globally, and this breakthrough is seen as an important technological milestone in the evolution of SiC substrates toward larger sizes and higher quality. Compared with the current mainstream 150 mm (6-inch) substrates, 300 mm substrates can yield about four times as many chips per wafer under the same process, delivering significant economies of scale.

Resonac, formerly Showa Denko, was formed in January 2023 through the merger of Showa Denko and Showa Denko Materials (formerly Hitachi Chemical). The company entered the SiC epitaxial wafer market as early as 2009 and has continued to push diameter enlargement: it mass-produced 6-inch SiC single-crystal substrates in March 2022, achieved mass production and shipment of 8-inch substrates and epi wafers in September of the same year, and completed the 12-inch technological breakthrough in September 2026.

Industry Background

The core value of SiC lies in its higher power conversion efficiency and lower heat loss compared with traditional silicon. Demand has long come mainly from high-growth sectors such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. Resonac currently focuses on 150 mm substrates as its main product, serving automotive parts makers and semiconductor device manufacturers such as ROHM that produce their own wafers. Its external SiC substrate sales have surpassed U.S.-based Wolfspeed to rank first globally.

The rise of AI data centers is opening up entirely new application space for SiC. In its announcement, Resonac noted that SiC single-crystal materials have high thermal conductivity, offering broad potential in heat dissipation substrates and advanced packaging substrates for AI servers and HPC semiconductors; their high refractive index also makes SiC an ideal candidate for waveguide materials in AR smart glasses. According to Japan's Fuji Keizai, the global power semiconductor wafer market is forecast to expand to JPY 911.8 billion by 2035, about three times the 2025 level, with SiC wafers expected to account for nearly 70%.

Upscaling remains a key challenge for industrialization. SiC crystal growth requires temperatures above 2,000°C and is highly prone to crystal defects; source ingots are extremely hard, and uniformly slicing and polishing them into flat substrates places extremely high demands on processing technology. Globally, companies including China's SICC and U.S.-based Wolfspeed have achieved lab breakthroughs in 12-inch SiC substrates, but no company has entered large-scale commercialization. Industry expects NVIDIA plans to introduce 12-inch SiC substrates in its next-generation GPUs in 2027, while TSMC is also advancing R&D on single-crystal SiC heat dissipation carriers.

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