Can India grow high-quality SiC single-crystal boules at competitive scale?

India imports 90 per cent of its wide-bandgap semiconductor chips as of 2025. The crystals those chips begin as — silicon carbide single-crystal boules — are made at scale in only a handful of countries.

Silicon carbide is the material behind efficient power electronics for electric vehicles, grids and defence systems. The global SiC device market was valued at around $2 billion, projected to reach $11–14 billion by 2030, growing at roughly 26 per cent a year, driven largely by electric vehicles. Boule growth sits at the head of that entire supply chain.

It is exceptionally hard. Unlike silicon, SiC crystals are grown by physical vapour transport at temperatures above 2000°C, at growth rates of only 0.5–2 mm per hour, over several weeks per boule. Micropipes, stacking faults and dislocations form readily. Crystal quality depends on holding temperature gradients, pressure regimes and vapour transport dynamics stable and reproducible across the whole cycle — variations propagate directly into defects and stress. Furnace internals must survive extreme heat without contaminating the crystal, and ultra-pure source powder and clean seed crystals are prerequisites.

India has demonstrated the science but not yet the scale. The Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (C-MET) established a facility for 2-inch-diameter SiC boule growth using physical vapour transport — a first for the country — sponsored by DRDO in collaboration with DMRL and SSPL. The Solid State Physics Laboratory (SSPL) developed indigenous processes for 4-inch SiC wafers and GaN HEMTs up to 150W, with limited production capability at GAETEC, Hyderabad. Commercial production is still ahead: SiCSem Private Limited, partnered with UK-based Clas-SiC Wafer Fab, broke ground in November 2025 on India's first commercial end-to-end SiC plant in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, approved under the India Semiconductor Mission in August 2025, expected operational by 2027–28 with capacity for 60,000 wafers annually.

The gap is one of scale, not first principles. Globally, the industry mainstreams 6-inch wafers and is transitioning to 8-inch, and volume producers run dozens to hundreds of growth systems in parallel. Wolfspeed alone holds roughly 60 per cent of the market; China captured about 40 per cent of wafer and epiwafer capacity by 2024, having built a mature 8-inch PVT ecosystem. India's demonstrations remain at 2- and 4-inch, R&D and limited-production stage.

Closing it means moving from single furnaces to many, holding defect density low across larger diameters, and building the metrology — X-ray diffraction, micropipe detection — that gates commercial readiness. SiCSem is the first test of whether that transition can be industrialised here.