News: Microelectronics
5 March 2026
Wolfspeed launches first commercially available 10kV SiC power MOSFET
Wolfspeed Inc of Durham, NC, USA — which makes silicon carbide (SiC) materials and power semiconductor devices — has announced what it claims is the industry’s first commercially available 10kV SiC power MOSFET. The firm says this unlocks architectural freedom, delivering unprecedented system durability, and advancing access to reliable and sustainable power for the most demanding applications. The advance challenges conventions in power conversion technology, delivering a solution to modernize the grid and critical power infrastructure, to accelerate industrial electrification, and to unleash the potential for AI data-center growth, it adds.
Picture: Wolfspeed’s 10kV bare die MOSFET.
“This represents a historic leap in power electronics that will reshape how the world generates, distributes and uses energy, unlocking the potential for modernization and more efficient power conversion,” comments Dr Subhashish Bhattacharya, Duke Energy Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. “The world is racing to connect AI data centers to the grid, and this will be the enabling technology for future generations of solid-state transformers at that critical grid interface.”
Unparalleled reliability for power-critical applications
The 10kV SiC MOSFET is said to set a new standard for durability and performance, with intrinsic time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) lifetime analysis predicting 158,000 years of operation at continuous 20V gate bias voltage. As the first in the industry to solve bipolar degradation of 10kV SiC MOSFETs, the device maintains reliable performance including body diode usage — essential for mid-voltage UPS systems, wind power, and solid-state transformer applications.
Architectural freedom: simplified systems, lower cost of ownership
Wolfspeed says that the availability of SiC technology at 10kV enables design flexibility that was not possible before, delivering a step function improvement in a system’s size, weight, reliability, and cost of ownership:
- Reduce system cost by about 30%: using 10kV SiC allows simpler system architectures, consolidating multi-cell designs into fewer cells and downsizing three-level inverters to a two-level topology;
- Improve power density by more than 300%: increasing switching frequencies from 600Hz to 10,000Hz simplifies control and gate drive circuitry, while also shrinking magnetics;
- Reduce system-level thermal requirements by up to 50%: achieving 99% conversion efficiency enables simpler and more efficient thermal management compared to silicon IGBT-based systems.
Realizing pulsed-power potential: enabling next-generation applications
With a faster rise time of less than 10ns, the new technology enables the replacement of conventional mechanical spark-gap switches — which degrade over time due to high-current, extremely high-temperature arcing that drives up maintenance costs and total cost of ownership — with SiC MOSFET-based solid-state switches. These solid-state devices eliminate arcing, enable efficient energy transfer, and improve timing precision of pulsed power transfer, while also reducing size and system complexity for high-performance pulsed-power applications including geothermal power, power generation for AI data centers, semiconductor plasma etching, and sustainable fertilizer production.
“This milestone is a culmination of nearly 30 years of vertically integrated crystal growth, thick epitaxy, and high-voltage device manufacturing excellence,” says chief business officer Dr Cengiz Balkas. “The commercialization of 10kV MOSFETs enables our customers who have been prototyping at this voltage to transition their designs to production, accelerating time to market. We’re not just ushering in a new era for high-voltage SiC - we’re making it real.”
The 10kV CPM3-10000-0300A SiC MOSFET die is available now for customer sampling and qualification.
