(Image: Toshiba Corp.)

Tokyo, Japan–This month (Dec. 2012), Toshiba Corporation (Tokyo: 6502) will begin mass-production of gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) white-emitting LEDs and start selling them to makers of general purpose and industrial LED lighting.

Conventional GaN-based LEDs, which include green, blue, violet, UV, and white LEDs, are manufactured using expensive sapphire wafers either 2 or 4 in. in diameter as substrates for the GaN-based LED thin films. Silicon wafers are far cheaper than sapphire — thus the push to Si.

Toshiba and Bridgelux (Livermore, CA), a company specializing in epitaxial growth and other LED manufacturing (and which has been working hard on GaN-on-Si LEDs), have developed a process for manufacturing GaN-based LEDs on 200 mm Si wafers. Toshiba has brought this process to a new production line at Kaga Toshiba Electronics Corporation (Iwauchi-cho, Japan) , a subsidiary of Toshiba and a discrete-products manufacturing facility. Mass production of packages using the new line’s output starts this month.

The 1 W LED is called the TL1F1, is 6.4 mm x 5.0 mm x 1.35 mm in size, and has a light flux of 112 lm at a 350 mA current. Toshiba plans a production capacity of 10,000,000 units per month.

Source: http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2012/opto_12_657.jsp