The U.S. government has selected Navitas Semiconductor to develop next-generation 10 kV silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors, the company announced via a release carried by the Manila Times.

The designation places Navitas — a power-semiconductor specialist headquartered in Torrance, California — inside a federal development program aimed at pushing SiC technology beyond the voltage classes that dominate today's commercial market. Current mainstream SiC MOSFETs operate largely at 650 V, 1,200 V and, at the top end for specialized applications, 3.3 kV. A 10 kV device class sits well above that range and targets applications where silicon-based insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) and lower-voltage SiC parts still define the engineering baseline.

Voltage class matters commercially because it determines where SiC can displace incumbent silicon. Medium-voltage applications — including grid-scale power electronics, industrial drives, rail traction and high-power renewable energy infrastructure — have remained largely out of reach for wide-bandgap devices because existing SiC components cannot block the required voltages in a practical topology. A 10 kV platform would allow designers to simplify or eliminate series-stacked device configurations, reducing component counts and improving efficiency in those systems.

For Navitas, the government selection extends a portfolio strategy that began in gallium nitride (GaN) fast-charging ICs for consumer devices and has since expanded into SiC through its 2023 acquisition of GeneSiC. The company now positions its GaNFast and GeneSiC product families across mobile, consumer, data-center, solar, energy-storage and electric-vehicle markets. A 10 kV development program would move the SiC line further up the power curve, into segments with longer design cycles but higher value per device.

The announcement arrives amid a broader U.S. policy push to strengthen domestic power-semiconductor supply chains. Washington has funded wide-bandgap manufacturing capacity directly — the CHIPS and Science Act awards to Wolfspeed for its New York materials facility and North Carolina device fabs being the largest examples — and has identified SiC and GaN as strategic technologies for electrification of transport, grid modernization and defense systems. Government selection of a specific company for next-generation device development fits that pattern of steering wide-bandgap capability toward infrastructure-class applications rather than consumer volume alone.

SiC itself has become the fastest-growing segment of the power-semiconductor market, driven principally by battery-electric vehicle traction inverters, where Tesla's adoption with STMicroelectronics-established supply set the precedent and players including Infineon, onsemi, Rohm and Bosch compete for design wins. The medium-voltage segment the 10 kV class addresses is smaller in unit terms but carries significance for grid and industrial power electronics, where efficiency gains translate directly into energy and cost savings over multi-decade equipment lifetimes.

No timeline, funding amount or capacity figure accompanied the announcement as reported. Whether the program leads to qualified production parts or remains a development-track effort will determine its commercial weight; a decade of prior 10 kV-class SiC research has shown that the blocking voltage is achievable in the lab, while reliable, manufacturable devices at that class remain a demanding engineering problem.

Navitas will next need to convert the government designation into a concrete development roadmap, device demonstrations and — eventually — qualification cycles with the grid, industrial and defense customers that operate at medium voltage. If it does, the selection could give the company an early anchor in a power-semiconductor tier where few suppliers currently compete.