Technical Upgrade Directions for High-Temperature Thermal Field Materials and Process Consumables Amid the SiC Industry Cycle Shift

1. Market Inflection Point: SiC Industry Shifts from “Capacity Expansion” to “Structural Divergence”

The silicon carbide (SiC) industry is at a critical inflection point in its business cycle. After a wave of massive capital expenditure expansion from 2019 to 2024, upstream capacity has become significantly oversupplied. Combined with slowing demand growth from electric vehicles, the SiC supply chain is now going through a capacity-digestion cycle: as of 2025, utilization rates for upstream manufacturing processes had fallen to around 50%, while device production lines were running at roughly 70% utilization.

This does not mean the industry is cooling off, however. In its outlook ahead of SEMICON China 2026, Yole Group noted that the overall outlook for 2026 is more optimistic than the pressured environment of 2024–2025 caused by slowing automotive demand, with industrial and energy applications expected to push the total SiC market past $4.6 billion in 2026. Domestic Chinese research also supports this view: the global SiC market was valued at roughly $4.6 billion in 2025 (with power devices accounting for about $2.9 billion), and is projected to grow to $5.2 billion in 2026.

A notable feature of this cycle is structural divergence across the value chain: globally, the SiC industry shows a “two-track” competitive pattern in which Chinese players have gained ground upstream while overseas leaders still dominate downstream devices. Chinese suppliers now hold nearly 40% of the global conductive SiC substrate market, with TianYue Advanced overtaking Wolfspeed to become the global market-share leader in 2025 at 27.6%. 2025 is widely regarded as the watershed year in which China’s SiC industry moved from “technology validation” to “large-scale commercialization”, with a marked rise in the share of domestic automotive-grade devices being adopted by carmakers. At the same time, a full-blown price war broke out, 8-inch yield ramp-up fell short of expectations, and conventional packaging processes became a bottleneck limiting device performance. Entering 2026, the industry is showing signs of recovery, with substrate prices bottoming out, 6-inch substrate pricing rebounding, and 8-inch pricing stabilizing.

The technical signal here is clear: the industry’s competitive focus is shifting from “who can expand capacity fastest” to “who can break through first on yield, purity, and large-size scaling.” This shift is now propagating upstream along the supply chain into high-temperature thermal field materials and process consumables.

2. Transmission Effect: The Thermal Field Materials Market Expands in Tandem as Purity Requirements Rise Across the Board

SiC single-crystal growth furnaces sublimate and recrystallize high-purity SiC powder inside a graphite crucible within a sealed, high-temperature chamber above 2000℃, using the physical vapor transport (PVT) method. Thermal field design and crystal-growth control parameters are the core variables determining crystal quality, size, and yield, and remain a long-standing technical challenge for the industry. This has directly driven parallel growth in demand for supporting materials such as graphite hot-zone components, graphite felt, and SiC crucibles.

According to industry data, the global graphite hot-zone market is expected to exceed RMB 12 billion in 2026, with China accounting for more than 45% of the total. As SiC device penetration accelerates, demand for ultra-high-purity graphite (purity ≥ 99.999%) and carbon/carbon composite materials is growing explosively. Per a white paper from the China Carbon Industry Association, the global specialty graphite market was valued at roughly RMB 18 billion in 2025, with an annual growth rate holding steady at around 12%; graphite hot-zone components and related products now account for 20%–30% of the total cost in core processes such as SiC crystal growth.

This wave of growth has been accompanied by a systematic rise in technical thresholds. Semiconductor-grade graphite products are now required to control ash content below 5ppm and thermal-field uniformity variance within 3%; as thermal-field components in single-crystal furnaces scale up beyond 2 meters, machining tolerance requirements have tightened to the ±5-micron level. Some leading manufacturers can already supply SiC crystal-growth graphite crucibles at ≥ 99.999% purity and have participated in drafting industry standards such as the “Technical Specification for Rigid Graphite Insulation Felt,” reflecting that downstream customer requirements for material purity, batch consistency, and technical responsiveness have entered a fine-grained, refined stage of competition.

3. Three Core Lines of Technical Upgrading

Given current market dynamics, the technical evolution of high-temperature thermal field materials and semiconductor process consumables is unfolding mainly along three lines:

1. Purity and cleanliness have become the watershed metrics. SiC crystal growth is extremely sensitive to impurities — even trace metal ions or particulate contamination can cause micropipe defects and increased dislocation density. Suppliers are expected to provide third-party test reports verifying ash content, thermal conductivity, and thermal weight-loss data; graphite felt used in semiconductor crystal-growth furnaces should preferably have ash content ≤ 50ppm with purification certification, to avoid the far greater losses caused by impurity-induced crystal defects. The same trend applies to SiC process components that directly contact the wafer, such as etch rings and wafer carriers — CVD SiC coating, which forms a dense, high-purity layer on the substrate surface to further reduce particle release and contamination risk, is becoming the mainstream technical route for semiconductor-grade components.

2. Large-size scaling and precision machining capability are building new barriers to entry. As SiC substrates upgrade from 6-inch to 8-inch, supporting thermal-field components — crucibles, insulation felt, furnace tubes — must scale up in size accordingly while maintaining extremely high dimensional precision and thermal-field uniformity. This places much higher demands on manufacturers’ molding, machining, and consistency-control capabilities. Capacity expansion alone can no longer create a competitive edge; manufacturers with large-format custom machining and fast response capabilities will be better positioned.

3. Domestic substitution is shifting from “material availability” to “performance parity.” Across the SiC supply chain, substrate makers, epitaxy houses, and device/module manufacturers are increasingly co-developing custom solutions with upstream suppliers of high-purity carbon sources, specialty graphite crucibles, and diamond wire, among other supporting materials. This full-chain collaboration shortens new-product validation cycles and avoids any single link in the chain being constrained by overseas suppliers. In practice, this means domestic material manufacturers’ role is evolving from simple “import substitution” toward becoming deeply integrated technical partners of crystal-growth and etching equipment makers.

4. Conclusion

The SiC industry currently sits in a dual cycle of “overall recovery and structural divergence”: short-term capacity-digestion pressure persists, but the long-term structural demand driven by electric vehicles, photovoltaic energy storage, and high-voltage power supplies for data centers remains fundamentally intact. For manufacturers of high-temperature thermal field materials and semiconductor process consumables, the real market opportunity no longer lies in simply following the pace of downstream capacity expansion, but in whether they can be the first to meet three converging technical upgrade requirements — purity, large-scale precision machining, and deep collaboration on domestic substitution. This will be the key variable determining how suppliers are re-ranked during the industry reshuffle over the next one to two years.