Plessey, a developer of award-winning optoelectronic technology solutions, announces it has placed an order for its next reactor from AIXTRON SE (FSE: AIXA), a global provider of deposition equipment to the semiconductor industry. The AIX G5+ C metal organic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) reactor will boost Plessey’s manufacturing capability of gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) wafers targeting next-generation microLED applications.

With an automatic cassette-to-cassette (C2C) wafer transfer module, the new AIXTRON reactor will be installed and operational during Q1 of 2019 at Plessey’s 270,000 sq ft fabrication facility located in Plymouth, UK. The AIX G5+ C MOCVD system has two separate chamber set-up options, which enables configurations of 8 x 6in or 5 x 8in GaN-on-Si wafers to be automatically loaded and removed from the system in an enclosed cassette environment. The system will be an addition to the company’s existing metal organic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) reactors, also supplied by AIXTRON, which provide configurations of 7 x 6in or 3 x 8in with manual loading.

Productivity is further enhanced by the new reactor’s automated self-cleaning technology, which helps to deliver a very low level of wafer defects by ensuring the reactor is clean on every run, significantly reducing downtime for maintenance. The new equipment also provides faster ramp and cool down along with a high susceptor unload temperature to reduce the recipe time.

The AIX G5+ C reactor will support Plessey’s extensive production roadmap to increase R&D capacity of its monolithic microLEDs based on its proprietary GaN-on-Si technology. Plessey’s microLEDs offer extremely low power, high brightness and very high pixel density to create the potential for disruption in many existing application areas that use conventional display technologies such as LCD and OLED.

Plessey’s mission is to become the world’s leading company developing innovative illuminators for display engines and full-field emissive microLED displays. The complex devices combine very high-density RGB pixel arrays with high-performance CMOS backplanes to produce very high-brightness, low-power, and high-frame-rate image sources for head-mounted displays, and wearable electronics devices for augmented reality and virtual reality systems.