So at any new design, one must ponder whether to use the better SiC MOSFETs or the cheaper silicon IGBTs.

Even if they are more expensive, SiC MOSFETs ensure economies elsewhere, i.e. they enable a higher energy efficiency, which reduces the operational costs for the end user, and also the use of cheaper devices in other parts of the system, which can compensate the higher cost of the SiC devices.

So now any price reduction of the SiC devices is welcome, expanding the range of products for which they will be chosen, thus their market share. The price reduction from using wafers with a double area can be very substantial, not only due to producing a double number of devices with a not much greater cost, but also by improving the yields for large-area devices, because usually the chips that are located close to the edge of the wafer have worse yields.

There already are many recent electric vehicles that use SiC MOSFETs, inclusively from Tesla and this is a market that grows quickly and SiC MOSFETs are a critical component for it, by enabling much better efficiency, size and weight of the electronics, in comparison with the old IGBTs.

I am pretty certain that the new EV chargers that can charge a vehicle in less than 10 minutes, or even in only 5 minutes, by working at voltages of up to 1 kV and currents of up to 1 kA, are made with silicon carbide MOSFET modules and it would have been difficult to make them in the past, when only IGBTs were available.

This is why for high-power switching they were quickly replaced by gas-filled tubes, long before WWII, e.g. with thyratrons (General Electric) and ignitrons (Westinghouse Electric).

Semiconductor devices have much lower conduction losses than even gas-filled tubes.

While conduction losses are much less a problem with semiconductor switches, many of the semiconductor switches have high switching losses, which limit their use to low switching frequencies.

Silicon carbide devices have lower switching losses than the older semiconductor devices, and gallium nitride have even lower switching losses than SiC devices, so both enable great increases in switching frequencies, which has many benefits.

As a bonus, in the future (when SiC crystals with a better quality will be available) silicon carbide devices will enable the production of high-voltage switches that require much fewer devices connected in series to reach working voltages of hundreds of kilovolt, or even of a few megavolt.

Nowadays, thermionic vacuum tubes or thyratrons remain sometime competitive in pulse switching applications, but only for very high voltages, i.e. above 50 kV. Even for such applications they have a too short lifetime, and there are better semiconductor alternatives, except that this market is too niche, so the big semiconductor device manufacturers do not bother to make such devices, which sometimes forces the use of obsolete vacuum tubes or thyratrons.

Only for the generation and amplification of electromagnetic waves in the microwave frequency range and at very high power, special vacuum tubes may remain preferable to semiconductor devices (e.g. the magnetrons of microwave ovens or the traveling-wave tubes still used in many satellites).