Driven by Partnerships: Turning Automotive Challenges into Breakthroughs 

Building Trust through Collaboration

At Wolfspeed, turning automotive challenges into breakthroughs isn’t just about enabling performance—it’s about partnership. Dr. Lauren Kegley, a product marketing leader within our automotive product line, shares how real progress comes when both the technical and relational foundations are strong.

“Every customer has a unique personality,” Lauren says. “Some need us to develop new technologies from the ground up to meet their requirement, while others want to capitalize on a product or technology we’ve already developed to get to market very quickly. Understanding the partnership style that our customers value is how trust begins.”

Solving Technical Challenges Together

Lauren’s professional journey with Wolfspeed exemplifies a company culture built around a commitment to deep teamwork when tackling challenging engineering problems. When thinking about examples of how teams can collaboratively overcome complicated technical problems, Lauren reflects back to her PhD work – which was undertaken while she was working at Wolfspeed after encouragement from the late CTO John Palmour.

During her PhD research, Lauren developed lifetime reliability models that became foundational for the commercial viability of Wolfspeed’s XM3 power module in automotive applications. That module now powers traction inverters on the road today.

As a part of her research, she worked closely with engineers across multiple teams to create a rigorous lifetime estimation tool built on failure mechanism analysis and statistical modeling. This included collaboration with fellow PowerMaker, Don Gajewski, who leads Wolfspeed’s reliability and failure analysis team. Through collaborative analysis of the XM3 platform, the team developed new failure analysis techniques, evaluated novel materials, conducted accelerated reliability testing, and synthesized all of these findings into lifetime prediction models that customers could leverage to understand the lifetime of their cars.

“Reliability modeling isn’t just about predicting future failures. It’s about enabling confidence,” Lauren explains. “Working with Don’s team, as well as designers and test engineers across our organization gave us the data and insights we needed to create reliability resources that would give customers confidence in the long lifetime of their systems.”

Turning Supply Chain Hurdles into Strengths

For Lauren, the biggest barriers in serving the automotive market aren’t always traditional engineering topics. Logistics, supply, quality and scale are critical components to developing strong customer partnerships. Wolfspeed’s investment in the 200mm Mohawk Valley fab and the JP materials facility has allowed us to move into leadership in capacity.

“The automotive market is driven by consumer demand, which requires a steady flow of available cars. When parts are hard to source, that’s not a downstream problem. Capacity and part availability feeds into design decisions, customer expectations, and ultimately trust just as much as excellent technical performance metrics do.” Lauren reflects. “Wolfspeed’s investments into highly automated fabrication facilities positions us well to support automotive demand for the long run and be a strong partner to scale EV availability together.”

Advantages of Silicon Carbide in EVs: More Than Just Range

Silicon carbide supports many of the consumer concerns around EV range anxiety, but Lauren sees that as the tip of the iceberg for how SiC makes EVs more accessible to consumers. Other ways that SiC is making EVs more exciting for consumers that you may not have heard of yet includes:

Together with our automotive customers, Wolfspeed works hand in hand to make these improvements real for drivers around the world.

What Drives a PowerMaker?

Beyond technical achievements, Lauren is deeply motivated by sustainability and creating opportunities for everyone to engage with new technology. Her love of continuous learning is matched by a desire to make EVs and the field of engineering more accessible. “I love being involved with and creating teams that help new technology, like EVs, expand from luxury items into broadly available resources that can improve our day-to-day experience and the world we live in.”

She also points out that her career has taught her a lot about the importance of the human side of technology; working across product development, quality, reliability, and engineering taught her that challenges are rarely one-dimensional. “The most satisfying wins are the ones where multiple teams come together—engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, etc. across both Wolfspeed and our customer—to solve a problem that no one group could do alone.”

Long-Range Impact

For Lauren, Wolfspeed’s culture of collaboration is matched by a deeper foundation: a relentless drive to innovate. “Innovation is our DNA,” she says. “Curiosity and ingenuity have always defined who we are. With some of the brightest minds in the industry working together, I am excited to see Wolfspeed continue transforming challenges into impactful solutions.”

As the automotive world demands more speed, reliability, sustainability and efficiency, Wolfspeed isn’t just keeping pace. We’re turning what used to be bottlenecks into differentiators.