Senior Vice President of IT & Chief Information Officer, WOLFSPEED INC
Priya Almelkar, Missy Stigall Running first-of-a-kind-fully automated 200mm SIC Fab, MESI 4.0 Summit
Running first-of-a-kind-fully automated 200mm SIC Fab Building the 1st ever and World's largest 200mm SiC Factory is a unique ...
About Priya Almelkar
At the MESI 4.0 Summit on September 17, 2024, Priya Almelkar, Senior Vice President of IT and Chief Information Officer at Wolfspeed, discussed the company's efforts to build and operate the world's first fully automated 200mm silicon carbide (SiC) factory. Almelkar stated that Wolfspeed is focused on raising $6.5 billion in investments to continue its manufacturing journey and noted that the company produces more than 60 percent of the world's silicon carbide. She said the factory, which she described as being in charge of, was announced in 2020 and is currently ramping production, with a planned revenue of about $2 billion when fully operational. Almelkar highlighted the company's decision to invest in an Industry 4.0 architecture to drive accelerated advantage, despite the cost, and emphasized the importance of building a strong cybersecurity governance framework combining OT and IT security. She mentioned that Wolfspeed is conducting a proof of concept with large language model AI to collect data for building solutions. Almelkar also noted the company's joint ventures with BorgWarner and ZF, as well as its involvement with the Jaguar TCS Formula E team. She attributed the company's collaborative culture to CEO Greg Lowe, stating that IT and Fab leaders presenting together reflects a "one pack" approach.
Transcript (21 segments)
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Narrator0:04
[Music]
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Host1:35
To dive into the world of innovation in manufacturing, our next session titled 'Running First-of-a-Kind Automated 200 Millimeter Silicon Carbide Fab' promises to provide insights into the innovation strides made in automation and fabrication. Get ready to be inspired by our speakers' expertise and experiences. I'm so happy that now we have two ladies on stage. Please join me in welcoming to stage Missy Stegall, Senior Vice President of Global Fab Operations at Wolfspeed, and Priya Almelkar, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Wolfspeed. Your applause for these lovely ladies, please. Thank you, ladies. It's great to have you here. The stage is yours. Thank you.
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Missy Stegall2:31
All right, hello everyone. On behalf of Priya and myself and our Wolfspeed team, I wanted to say thank you to Anna and the entire Critical Manufacturing team for having us here today. We're really excited to share the Wolfspeed story.
Silicon carbide... to help dreamers change the world. Whether it's creating a cleaner planet, zero emissions, or a 100% efficient power grid, we are unleashing possibilities for those who dream big, turning moonshots into Mars shots, trading miles per gallon for more miles per charge, powering not just homes, but cities, where we consume less while doing more. For over 30 years, we've turned imagination into reality and possibilities through the passion of our people, the power of silicon carbide. So it's with optimism that we face what's next, because we're dreamers too, engineering a more sustainable future for us all. It's the beginning of a new era in energy efficiency. It's powered...
All right, so who is Wolfspeed? Wolfspeed is a 35-year-old company that started off as Cree LED, and in 2022 we actually transitioned to Wolfspeed, and we are powering the possibilities of silicon carbide devices. So today we're focused on raising $6.5 billion in investments to continue our manufacturing journey. And why am I here today? Because I am, in most cases, your end customer. I run our Global Fab operations, and what our IT teams do actually enables me and my team to manufacture those power devices. So a little bit about us: we have joint ventures or joint partnerships with BorgWarner, with ZF. We also are part of... has anyone heard of Formula E by any chance? Raise your hand. Formula E. We're also part of the Jaguar TCS Formula E, and by the way, we were top finishers this year. As you can see, yes, that's really exciting, right? It's super exciting. As you can see, we've also recently announced plans to build the world's largest silicon carbide factory in Saarland, Germany. That's a little bit about us. We've been in the business again for 35 years. We're a fully vertically integrated company, and I want to highlight that because as Priya comes on stage to talk about how she's enabling my team, that vertical integration and the things like big data that we heard about today, those are all going to become extremely important. Other fun facts: we create more than 60% of the silicon carbide in the world. So we are those innovators.
Okay, for those of you who don't know, because maybe you're in IT and in some of the engineering areas, you've heard of a thing called semiconductors. Typically that's built on silicon — that's where I actually started my career. So what is silicon carbide? Well, silicon carbide is just what you imagine: it's silicon and carbon, and it's put together and heated to half the temperature of the sun. So as you can imagine, for a company that's vertically integrated, we can't just go down to our local hardware store and buy the parts for that. We actually build a lot of our equipment, and the data within that equipment, especially when we talk about the temperatures from our material side, is extremely important. Silicon carbide is important because as we move into electric vehicles, it allows for faster switching and more efficiency. And what we're also seeing nowadays is that silicon carbide is not just something that our automotive customers are interested in; it's actually really taking off in industrial applications as well.
So a little bit about Wolfspeed in its journey. As you can imagine, silicon carbide is about 30 years behind the silicon industry. If you take a look, in 1992 Wolfspeed started off with 25-millimeter wafers, so very small. And from 1992 up until 1999, they gradually grew the size of those wafers. As most of you know, the silicon industry today talks a lot about 300 millimeter; again, we're very behind in that space. But from 1999 to 2009 we moved from the 100-millimeter, so four-inch wafers, into the six-inch wafer space. And then in 2015 we actually produced the first 200-millimeter silicon carbide wafer. And I really want to highlight that this in itself is highly innovative because silicon carbide is plagued with tons of defects. We have micropipes that are a major defect, we have dislocation reduction, and then we also — not only while we created these larger wafers, we had to work to reduce all that defectivity. So right when COVID hit in 2020, we announced the world's first silicon carbide 200-millimeter factory. And I am in charge of that factory today, and I'm happy to announce that we are actually up and ramping production, so it's really exciting times for us.
So if you look at what we do and where we start, we go from product design, to silicon carbide crystal, and then we go to the wafers and epitaxy. And that's the material side of the house, that's our materials manufacturing. And then it moves over into my realm, which is the device processing. So I create all of those chips that go into your electric vehicles and your industrial applications. From there we go from the device processing to test, packaging, and final test. So as you can imagine, for a company that's vertically integrated, this is a lot of data. So all those things where David talked about Lamb and the tools and the things that we need off those tools, that's real, and that's what's actually going to help us continue to be competitive in this space as we transform the industry from silicon to silicon carbide.
So the other thing that Wolfspeed is focused on is creating a sustainable future. As you all know, manufacturing tends to be harmful to our environment, but with our focus on electrification and the power efficiencies that you get from our products, we're actually having a positive impact on the environment. We're reducing landfill waste 75%. This is also a new materials factor that we have, and we've been working closely with the North Carolina government to make that impact. LEED certification: the factory that is in Mohawk Valley, our Utica factory, it is LEED certified, and we have plans to take the LEED certification to Saarlouis in Germany as well, as well as follow a lot of the German requirements with regards to sustainability. You can also see that our products in the wild actually have a positive impact as well. We have the electric vehicles, the lifetime GHG emissions, as well as some of the impact of solar inverters. So I really wanted to highlight why we're really pushing the industry forward to move away from silicon to silicon carbide.
So here is the first — the world's first, only, and largest — 200-millimeter silicon carbide factory, again located in New York, in Utica. We are actually up and ramping today, and so as you can imagine, when I talk about the very fact that this was a brownfield in 2020, and today in 2023 we have our first line of tools installed and we're actually ramping production, that's quite significant in the world of semiconductors. Think back to all of those fabs that have been announced recently, think of those timelines, and then imagine the fact that we're already producing wafers out of this factory today. And not only that, we're in production, and we plan to have about a $2 billion revenue coming out of this factory when it's fully up and running. We've also announced the world's largest silicon carbide factory in Saarlouis, Germany. So I'm super excited to say that we've picked areas where not only are we bringing new semiconductor industry, but we're impacting those communities around us. So with that being said, I'm going to hand it over to Priya so she can talk about all the things she's doing that empowers my team to produce the silicon carbide wafers.
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Priya Almelkar11:45
Thank you, Missy.
So as you can see, our operations team had a huge charter, right? They wanted to build the first and largest fully automated silicon carbide factory, and not only build that but then have plans to be able to scale. I want to give you a little glimpse of where we started and where we are.
So as you can see, we had a very fragmented architecture, manual factory. But our North Star was we wanted connected plants, connected digital worker. We wanted to make sure that we built that foundation that we could scale upon. So we knew that we had to start with an Industry 4.0 architecture so that we could build a scalable factory, provide applications that provide an integration backbone, and provide data to our — we talked a lot about data-driven decisions today, right? We wanted to provide a platform where our factory workers had data at their fingertips.
Oops. Okay, so as any project, right, we started with a phased approach, right? Looking at what our snops today, getting capability assessment, gap analysis. We knew that our architecture was going to cost us a pretty penny, right? It was not going to be on the cheap side. But we made that decision because we wanted to drive the accelerated advantage, right? As Missy mentioned, we have ramped up in less than three years, when any semiconductor is about a five-year journey, right? So this has definitely provided us that innovation. One of the other challenges that we had was normally you see digitization happening in 300 millimeter. In 200 millimeter, mostly it's the legacy factories that are operating, so even the tools that we had for 200 millimeter didn't even have the right protocols to be able to do that integration. And like Missy mentioned, we started this in the heart of the pandemic, so March 2020 is when we put the shovel in the ground, and that's when the pandemic hit. Everything — all the supply chain issues, travel — everything was a challenge. So we decided to get external load ports to integrate with our tools. Now that helped with the accelerated journey, but it was a challenge for the IT team because we now had to do three-way integration between the tools, the overhead transport control, and the external load port. So all of this complexity, we started looking at which tools or which MES solution we could utilize to build that backbone. We reviewed many, many MES solutions. Some of the team members that were part of Wolfspeed are here today as well, and we picked Critical Manufacturing. What we realized is there was a lot in common between Critical Manufacturing and us. We both came from a semiconductor background, right? We love semiconductor. We were small enough relatively so that we could provide that flexibility and agility, and then we had that passion to prove it can be done, right? Because trying to do this in 200 millimeter required a lot of customization, a lot of flexibility, a lot of trial and error. And obviously the proof is that we have achieved that. So that's how our partnership started.
Now to build that architecture and get to the point today, there was a lot of conversation about that digitization and Industry 4.0 and AI is all a journey, right? So for our journey, it all started with building a small team that really had to know the business of operations, and the same for operations team, they had to understand what the system does, what capabilities. I think the panel talked about that as well today. So we started with what could be the minimum viable product for our factory, and you know obviously MES — Versatile MES — was the backbone, along with — we talked about today PLM, ERP — all of those solutions. We enabled MES, reporting, along with scheduler for our factory workers to make sure that they understand the production anomalies, that they are able to get data to be able to respond pretty quickly. And now we are building the advanced capabilities. So one of the differentiating factors for us is we wanted to make sure that we have an advanced analytics platform that was bringing in data from across so that we could really build that advanced capability, so it could be the foundation for predictive maintenance, for artificial intelligence, so on and so forth.
Now it would be amiss as a CIO if I do not talk about security. Obviously connected digital manufacturing obviously increases the risk to security for the factory substantially, right? You can see that Gartner predicts that cyber attackers will have weaponized and what is the impact, the risk impact that we are looking at. So we had to make sure that we built a strong cybersecurity governance framework that really took the best in class from OT and IT security and combined it together, right? Our connected sensors, they made sure that it brings the alerts and everything to our factory personnel so that they understand the environment they are in, ensure that they can react quickly. But at the same time, our cybersecurity is very connected with our tools, so we gather all the alerts, performance monitoring data, and then we are able to work with our factory leaders to make sure that if there is a downtime required, how do we partner together so that we can be proactive and reduce the cycle time in the factory.
So all of this data that we are collecting is enabling us to build that foundation because eventually the goal is that we could have AI-powered surveillance that provides us real-time, not only threat detection — because that we are doing today — but more of that diagnosis and analysis in real time, which is a lot of what we talked about today.
Now, Missy talked about what are some of the challenges that we have for running silicon carbide, right? We already — you heard from her — have the temperature of the sun, you heard that it doesn't melt, so it evaporates, so precision is really key. And then you can only use one type of crystal from all the different crystals that can be manufactured with silicon carbide, so precision is obviously one of the challenges that we had to work with. And then within IT, we had to make sure that we are building those systems for that resiliency and precision, which we are utilizing Critical Manufacturing's IoT framework for that automation. Now for that automation, the three-way integration with external load port that I talked about, that is something that we had to templatize, we had to customize that and build that. And for every process module, it took us a few months to be able to do that, but we did it in a scalable architecture so that now if we have to deploy any one that we have already automated, it only takes us less than two weeks to be able to deploy that. So that's where our focus has been, making sure that we are able to build capabilities that allow us to scale, because we have another factory coming up in Saarlouis.
And I think most of you already know, right? This is not the first fully automated factory, but it's the first and only and largest fully automated 200-millimeter silicon carbide factory. So to do 200 millimeter, and plus the fact that we are vertically integrated, we had to build a lot of our tools ourselves as well. So not only customized software that we talked about, but also the tools that we had to work with. And one of the comparisons that I like to provide to my team so that they wrap their head around the overall integration is if you think about Tesla, right? They started as a software company and then they built cars, while we are working with a lot of the components that go in the car in any OEMs — Mercedes, we talked about JLR, and no, I'm not getting any commission from any of these to mention their names — but the challenge that they have is they have all these components that come with their own software, and now we are trying to combine. So for IT teams, it is really important for us to make sure that we build that integration right, and how we customize that integration is going to be that differentiating factor. So that's why I think that Wolfspeed Insights — that platform, that integration layer that you saw — is really key for us, and we decided, we made a decision to build that in-house because we wanted to make sure that all of that data, all of that secret sauce, is something that our team internally holds. As a matter of fact, we are actually doing a POC with large language model AI, and we are trying to collect all of that data today in our environment as well so that we can build solutions just like how you see on your phone. When you open up an email, it gives you suggested responses. That same response we want to make sure that we can provide in the factory process. So obviously accuracy and precision is key, so it'll take us a while to get there, but that's where we are starting to collect a lot of that data and doing some POCs today.
Now, technology is great, but more than technology, I think it's the people, right? Our CEO, Greg Lowe, he makes sure that our company has a very people-oriented culture. We are small relatively, we make sure that we are partners. Our OEM providers, we work very collaboratively with each other, and that's the culture that we build within our organization as well. That's why you see Missy and I sharing the stage today. I don't know how many semiconductor companies you see where an IT and a fab leader are presenting together. This is really something that I am really proud of, to be part of that team where we collaborate like that. We actually call our team 'One Pack' from our Wolfspeed pack, because that's how we like to operate, and that's one of the other differentiating factors that we have in our environment. So hopefully us sharing some key insights with you helped you. We understand and know that silicon carbide is far behind silicon, so we are not there in terms of all the technology that you heard from our 300-millimeter partners, but I think our accelerated journey to get to a fully operating automated factory in less than three years — we thought some of the key learnings we could share with you. Thank you.
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Host25:00
Thank you, thank you so much to both of you for sharing your journey.