Durham semiconductor company Wolfspeed completes first step of $1B expansion project
Wolfspeed, the Durham-headquartered company previously called Cree, held a grand opening ceremony Monday in Marcy, New York, for a new manufacturing site — the world’s “first, largest and only” 200mm silicon carbide fabrication plant in the world, according to the company.
Wolfspeed chips from the new factory will feature in automotive inverters for General Motors and Lucid Motors, a new player in electric vehicle production. Wolfspeed’s plant employs about 200 workers and will grow to 600 over the next several years.
Lucid announced its partnership with Wolfspeed on Monday at the New York ribbon cutting. The company claims its 2022 Lucid Air sedan, powered in part by Wolfspeed’s technology, will have the longest battery-only range of any EV on the market.
The Marcy manufacturing facility is Wolfspeed’s first step in a $1 billion expansion that will include additions to its Durham operation. Between its headquarters at 4600 Silicon Drive and a manufacturing site in RTP, the company employs more than 1,800 people in the Triangle, according to Rex Felton, Wolfspeed’s head of global operations.
“And we probably are looking at doubling our space,” Felton said, “...I’d say the headcount numbers are certainly going up by hundreds.”
Durham’s production site specializes in a smaller semiconductor than what the company will produce in New York. Both have applications in EVs and several tangential industries.
“We’re in things like wall chargers, and fast chargers — like what companies would have in their parking lots — and things like that,” Felton said. “We’re really into cutting-edge things such as drones and even electric scooters and motorcycles. Anything that uses power for propulsion we can potentially be a very good application for.”
Alleviating the chip shortage
Wolfspeed adopted its new name in October, a move that reflected the company’s double-down on semiconductor development.
In 2017, when CEO Greg Lowe assumed the the company’s top position, Cree recast itself as a global leader in chip research. The 35-year-old manufacturer was a premier producer of light and LED products, but Lowe hoped to center Cree’s future around a division within the company that made silicon carbide chips.
The division, Wolfspeed, was the smallest of Cree’s three businesses. Now its cutting-edge technology is the company’s main currency.
“We’re not an LED company. We’re not a lighting company,” Lowe told The News & Observer last year. “We are a powerhouse compound semiconductor company focused on silicon carbide, so I think (the name change) will help clarify our identity more than anything.”
Lowe’s judgment seems prescient in light of a global chip shortage that has stifled industries from auto manufacturing to consumer electronics. Wolfspeed’s semiconductors have unique applications, and its added production capacity may help alleviate some the country’s backlog.
“We’ve seen this huge steepening of our demand curve, for a lot of reasons,” Felton said, “One of them is there’s just a lot of demand because of the pandemic and supply chain. The other is there’s a lot of push to go to not just hybrid cars, but full battery electric cars.”
Concurrent with its name change last year, Wolfspeed announced a partnership with General Motors as the Detroit carmaker amplified development of electric vehicles.
“That’s a massive company and they’ve stated very clearly their intention to move more and more of their product to electrification,” Felton said. “We’re looking forward to playing very heavily in that.”
Felton said he could not identify other automakers besides GM and Lucid that have expressed interest in Wolfspeed’s products, but “all the major players are on the table.”
As Wolfspeed achieves new growth, Felton anticipates the company featuring prominently in EVs’ future ubiquity.
“We’re checking a lot of boxes for the industry,” he said. “And we believe it’s going to be a key enabler for the growth of our customers, and especially the growth of electrification, as the world moves in that direction. So that’s a key and that’s why we’re so excited about it.”
This story was originally published April 27, 2022 at 10:03 AM.
