Can India build silicon carbide substrates for power electronics and EVs?

As of July 2026, India makes zero silicon carbide substrates. Every wafer that goes into an electric-vehicle inverter or a grid-scale renewable converter is imported. The country imports 90–95% of its semiconductor demand overall, and for SiC substrates the dependence is total.

The substrate is where the difficulty concentrates. It accounts for 47% of the entire SiC value chain — the single largest slice, ahead of epitaxial layers at 23% — precisely because the technological barriers are so high. SiC is grown as a boule by Physical Vapor Transport, a slow process that takes several days per crystal. The material's hardness, second only to diamond, makes slicing, grinding and polishing extraordinarily difficult and demands specialised tooling. A single 6-inch wafer line requires roughly $180 million in capital, and a SiC facility costs 2.4 times more than a traditional silicon fab.

This is why the field is so narrow. Only seven players worldwide can vertically integrate from bulk crystal growth through polishing to epitaxy. Four control 82% of the substrate market; Wolfspeed alone held 33.7% in 2024. The top five suppliers commanded about half of global capacity in 2025.

India's entry is beginning, both projects in Odisha. SiCSem, a subsidiary of Archean Chemical Industries partnered with UK-based Clas-SiC Wafer Fab, broke ground on 1 November 2025 for an end-to-end facility near Bhubaneswar, backed by government approval in August 2025. It targets 60,000 SiC wafers annually with operations in 2027–2028. RIR Power Electronics, with a ₹618 crore investment, aims for Phase 1 epitaxy wafer production by December 2025, focusing on high-power devices from 3.3 kV to 20 kV for EVs, renewables and industrial automation. Both remain in early stages — neither is producing at scale.

The gap persists because the substrate rests on a stack of hard processes: crystal growth above 2300°C, chemical-mechanical polishing to sub-nanometre roughness, epitaxy held to a 1500–1650°C window where temperature gradients alone can wreck device yield, and metrology to catch micropipes and dislocations. Some 80–90% of the process equipment is sourced from Japan, the US, the Netherlands, Taiwan and South Korea.

The scale of what it would take is set nationally. India's semiconductor roadmap estimates $135–180 billion in capital expenditure over a decade, targeting 35–50% self-sufficiency by 2035. For context, China's chip fund committed $7 billion to SiC alone across 2024–2025, letting TankeBlue run an 8-inch line making 600,000 wafers a year — the diameter transition on which future cost reduction depends.