Major semiconductor manufacturers are actively deploying the automotive SiC market

Semiconductor factory Onsemi announced at the end of April this year that it signed a SiC power device LTSA with Jikr Automobile, a subsidiary of China's Geely Automobile Group. The energy conversion efficiency of the system improves endurance and reduces mileage anxiety of car owners. This move can also be seen that #Onsemi is actively deploying SiC for vehicles, and is accelerating to catch up with the two leading manufacturers of STMicroelectronics and Infineon.

In the electric vehicle SiC semiconductor market, #STMicroelectronics and #Infineon continued to occupy the leading position in the SiC market by virtue of their early entry into the car factory, while Wolfspeed and ROHM came from behind by mastering the vertical integration technology of SiC.

In contrast, Onsemi, although it acquired GT Advanced Technologies in 2021, mastered the most difficult wafer growth and production equipment technology in the SiC manufacturing process, and became an IDM factory comparable to Wolfspeed, ROHM and STM, and also announced that 2025 8-inch SiC wafers will be mass-produced in 2019, but its SiC power semiconductors will only be installed in the models of small and medium-sized car manufacturers such as NIO and Lucid before 2023, and it is still a chaser in the market.

However, it is precisely because of the maturity of the industry built by first movers such as #Infineon and #STM, and Onsemi’s early layout benefits for SiC-related technologies will begin to ferment in 2023. #Krypton, #BMW, #Hyundai, and #Volkswagen's #LTSA, plus its president and CEO #Hassane El-Khoury's bold words that the SiC business can bring in $4 billion in revenue in the next three years, make Onsemi the largest SiC market so far this year. The most topical #semiconductor factory.

In fact, the intense competition in the SiC market will be an endurance race that will test the durability of resource investment. The reason for the rapid growth of SiC demand in the past five years is mainly due to the high cost of batteries and the development of energy density has reached the limit. Therefore, car manufacturers have switched to using SiC chips in #electronic control #components as a solution to improve battery life without increasing the number of batteries. plan.

However, due to the sudden increase in demand, automakers are actively requesting semiconductor factories to accelerate the research and development of SiC technology. In the case of greatly shortened R&D time, R&D costs have also increased relatively. In addition, the fierce market competition has an impact on profitability, which means that The ability to invest R&D resources and overall profitability will be the key indicators to measure the competitiveness of semiconductor factories.

Referring to the 2022 financial reports of various semiconductor factories, Onsemi has successfully improved its profit performance in the past few years by eliminating the chaff and preserving the chaff of the product line. It ranks among the best with a gross profit margin of 49%. There is room to meet the cost requirements of automakers and obtain orders in exchange for the growth of SiC product economies of scale.

However, in the ratio of R&D costs to revenue, Onsemi ranks 7% compared to major competitors #Wolfspeed (26%), Infineon (13%), STM (12%) and #ROHM (8%) At the bottom, with the increasing investment in technologies such as reducing on-resistance and improving process yield, how do semiconductor factories maintain the balance between profit performance and resource expenditure under the premise of achieving revenue targets through fierce market competition? Balance will become an important issue that Onsemi will face after receiving orders from automakers.

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