Converting a California fab to silicon carbide

The challenge

Enable a newly acquired plant in the US to produce chips on 200 mm silicon carbide wafers, and bring Bosch’s procedures and standards to the people already working there.

This meant both transferring the production technology and integrating the site into Bosch, with workstreams from manufacturing, IT and site and building to quality, purchasing, finance, HR and legal.

The technology

What Roseville made before: TSI Semiconductors was a foundry for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), producing large volumes of standard silicon chips on 200 mm wafers for mobility, telecommunications, energy and life sciences.

What it will make: power semiconductors made of silicon carbide (SiC), mainly SiC MOSFETs for electric cars. They sit in the power electronics, for example the inverter, which turns the battery’s direct current into alternating current for the motor, and in charging converters. Energy and telecommunications are planned as future markets.

Why silicon carbide: according to Bosch, SiC chips use up to 50% less energy than silicon chips, which gives electric cars more range and more efficient charging.

What changes in the fab: the existing clean rooms stay, but much of the equipment has to be replaced, because SiC is far harder to process than silicon. The Roseville team is trained alongside experts from Reutlingen, where Bosch already makes SiC chips. The fab handles both frontend manufacturing and the backend steps of testing, sorting and dicing.

Where it stands today: sample production started in 2026, with commercial production on 200 mm wafers planned for later in the year. At full capacity, Roseville is expected to make up more than 40% of all US silicon carbide chip manufacturing capacity.

What I did

• Worked as a member of the project lead team. As the PMO, our team covered project management practices across all workstreams.
• Helped create the project charter and the project management plan.
• Created and helped create project documents: templates, lessons-learned records and a change-management workflow.
• Managed the schedule and dependencies between workstreams.
• Maintained the risk register and prepared status reports for the steering committee.
• Worked directly with senior management of Bosch Semiconductor Operations: prepared and followed up international workshops and meetings, from team to management level.
• Moderated most of the project kick-off with stakeholders from Germany and the US, gathering input on scope, dependencies and schedule.
• Aligned project information with stakeholders in Germany and the US.

Result

By linking dependencies between work packages across workstreams that had not been recorded before, I helped shorten the schedule by about 20 working days.