Category Archives: LED Manufacturing

GT Advanced Technologies logoGT Advanced Technologies today announced that it has acquired substantially all of the business of Thermal Technology LLC for purchase consideration, consisting of approximately 3.4 million shares of GTAT common stock and an earn out. Located in Santa Rosa, CA, Thermal Technology develops and sells a wide range of high temperature thermal and vacuum products used in the fabrication of advanced materials that are deployed across multiple industries including smartphones and touch screens, LED, medical devices, oil and gas and automotive to name a few. Thermal Technology has delivered over 3,000 products to customers in over 40 countries since it was founded 60 years ago.

GT has acquired several key products and technologies that will allow GT to address new markets with a range of production equipment options. This includes annealing technology that the company believes will be important in the manufacturing of sapphire cover screens; crystal growth technology based on the Kyropoulous (KY) growth method and edge defined film growth (EFG) technology for large surface area sapphire. The company has also acquired Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) technology, which allows dense ceramics to be obtained under uniform heating at relatively low temperatures and in short processing times. The SPS technology is expected to have a wide range of applications including with medical applications, sputtering targets, space applications and thermoelectric convertors for hybrid electric cars.

"The acquisition of the Thermal Technology business adds a number of innovative and important products and technologies to our rapidly diversifying portfolio that will, we believe, allow us to accelerate our entrance into new markets," said Tom Gutierrez, GT’s president and CEO. "The acquisition expands our served markets and complements several of our current product lines. In areas such as sapphire crystal growth, we can now offer customers a wider range of product options best suited to their specific production environments. This will enable us to compete for incremental business in areas where we would have previously been unable to offer a product."

"This is an exciting moment for the company, our employees and our customers," said Matt Mede, president and CEO of Thermal Technology. "The acquisition will open new opportunities for growth for our products and technology as we integrate them into GT’s business operations. Leveraging GT’s leadership in engineering and product development and their strengths in low-cost global supply chain management will accelerate the time-to-market of our technology to drive market adoption in several promising markets as we go forward. Customers will also benefit through GT’s global service and support capabilities."

GT does not expect the acquisition to materially impact its CY13 revenue or earnings guidance range. The anticipated revenue contribution from the Thermal Technology business in the balance of FY13 is approximately $9 to $14 million. GT expects minimal impact on earnings per share as expenses and the increase in share count will limit the contribution during the initial year of integration.

The LED industry gained a foothold for growth in the parts and materials industry after LED technology was applied to the TV backlight unit (BLU). The industry is now about to advance again with the development of the LED lighting, an end product industry. Accordingly, LED-related companies are in intense competition to cut costs, improve yield rate, and develop core technology to survive.

The ingot and substrate industry, the front-end in the LED supply chain, experienced soaring prices and oligopolistic market from the growth of the LED industry and a supply shortage in 2010. But revenues declined rapidly in 2011 when an LED industry slump caused prices to plunge and inventory to build up. According to this report, the LED ingot market is expected to recover after 2012 and increase to $324 million by 2015. 

“LED Ingot and Substrate Industry Analysis and Forecast,” by Displaybank, recently acquired by IHS Inc. (NYSE:IHS), analyzes overall status and outlook of the sapphire ingot industry through the analyses of manufacturing technology and processing of the sapphire ingot widely used as LED ingots; status of major ingot makers; trend of start-up companies; manufacturers’ capacities; and market price and demand forecasts.

This report will be of great help to the LED ingot and substrate makers; Epi—wafer and chip-related companies; package firms; companies interested in lighting and new businesses applying LED technology; and manufacturers in LED components and materials industry. In particular, this report is expected to provide the related companies with useful information as it contains in-depth analysis and forecasts of the 6-inch ingot market and price.

Engineered Material Systems, a global supplier of electronic materials for circuit assembly applications, debuts its CA-105 Low-Cost Conductive LED Die Attach Adhesive for attaching LEDs and other small semiconductor die to silver and copper lead frames.

EMS CA-105 is approximately half the cost of a pure silver filled die attach adhesive, has a high glass transition temperature (Tg) to facilitate wire bonding small die, has low extractable ionics and high adhesion to silver and copper lead frames. CA-105 has a dispensing open time (pin transfer) greater than 24 hours (measured as a 25 percent increase in viscosity), while maintaining optimized rheology for pin transfer or needle dispensing.

CA-105 is the latest addition to Engineered Material Systems’ line of electronic materials for semiconductor, circuit assembly, photovoltaic, printer head, camera module, disk drive and photonic applications.

Engineered Materials Systems, Inc. (EMS) technology focus is on electronic materials for semiconductor, circuit assembly, photovoltaic, printer head, camera module, disk drive and photonics assembly product lines.

LED die attach adhesive

Hitachi Cable, Ltd. announced today that it has developed a new mass-production technology for GaN-templates, in which a high-quality gallium nitride (GaN) single-crystal thin film is grown on a sapphire substrate.

Using this product as a base substrate for an epitaxial wafer for white LEDs makes it possible to drastically improve productivity of white LED epiwafers and the LED properties. Hitachi intends for this product to become an effective solution to improve the position of white LED manufacturers in the industry, where there is severe competition.

The demand for white LEDs is rapidly expanding, and they have come to be used in backlight unit in liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and ordinary lighting devices in recent years, thanks to their energy efficiency and long service life. The structure of an white LED epiwafer consists of a thin, active layer and a p-type GaN layer with a total thickness of about 1μm over an n-type GaN layer with a thickness of about 10μm, grown on a sapphire substrate. Hitachi said all of these crystal layers are produced by the MOVPE method in ordinary manufacturing processes. The MOVPE method is suitable for growing active layers which require atomic-level control of the film thickness. Meanwhile, a disadvantage of this method is that it takes a long time to grow a high-quality and thick n-type GaN layer. White LED epiwafers can be grown about once or twice a day at the most, and thus there is a need for a high-efficiency production method.

To solve this problem, Hitachi Cable developed a GaN-template used as a base substrate for growth in the MOVPE method.

The GaN template consists of an n-type GaN layer grown on a sapphire substrate. Using a GaN-template means LED manufacturers do not need to grow an n-type GaN buffer layer and this reduces the time required for growth by about half compared with conventional methods. The GaN-templates of Hitachi Cable are also suitable for high-output LEDs which require large currents because they allow both low resistance and high crystal formation.

Hitachi Cable has developed single-crystal free-standing GaN substrates used for blue-violet lasers and developed unique HVPE-growth technology and machines for mass-production of GaN substrates. Based on this technology, Hitachi Cable developed new high-efficiency production technology and machines for mass-production of high-quality GaN-templates.

Main characteristics of GaN-template include:

  • High crystal quality and high surface quality based on growth technology established in the development of free-standing GaN substrates
  • Low resistance n-type GaN buffer which is suitable for high-output wafers and bonding-type LEDs
  • Templates on flat-surface sapphire substrates and various types of PSS (Note 4) are available
  • Wafers with 2 to 6 inches in diameters are available (8-inch version is now planned for development)

With this new GaN-template added to the lineup of GaN substrates and GaN epiwafers that it has been selling, Hitachi Cable plans to strengthen and expand its GaN product group and offer compound semiconductor products.

Increased spending in NAND and flash by Micron, LEDs by Philips and Osram, and continued investments by GLOBALFOUNDRIES will create new opportunities for equipment and materials suppliers in Southeast Asia. These trends will be explored at the upcoming SEMICON Singapore 2013, which will take place May 7-9 at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Center. With a focus on new technologies and products for advanced IC packaging, test, and fab efficiency, as well as in new application areas including LEDs and MEMS, the event capitalizes on Southeast Asia’s strong contribution to the global semiconductor market.

For the Southeast Asia region, capital equipment investment will see some pickup in the second half of 2013, followed by a strong recovery in 2014. Overall front-end fab equipment spending is expected to double next year from $810 million in 2013 to $1.62 billion in 2014. Foundry and memory are the two major sectors that invest most in the region. The GLOBALFOUNDRIES expansion plan at Fab 7 will be completed by mid-2014 while UMC continues to upgrade their Fab 12i capacity to 40nm process.

The Southeast Asia region’s capacity growth for front-end fabs shows two percent increase this year and an expectation of  higher growth, eight percent, in 2014, exceeding overall global capacity growth of five percent according to the SEMI World Fab Forecast.  The growth will mainly be driven by memory sector, specifically from NAND flash capacity as Micron gears up for further expansion at its Singapore NAND flash facility next year plus ongoing capacity conversion from DRAM to NAND flash at Fab 7 (Tech). Singapore is emerging to become the third largest NAND flash manufacturing country in the world by the end of 2014.  The conversion and the expansion projects will drive related semiconductor investment in the region in 2013 and 2014.     

For the assembly and test sector, Southeast Asia has long been the focal point of the industry with a large installed capacity from both IDMs and OSATs.  This position contributes to the region being the largest packaging materials consumption market in the world, representing a market size of $6.6 billion in 2013 and $6.8 billion in 2014. The region’s back-end equipment investment remain significant with over $1 billion spending each year throughout 2012 to 2014, accounting for about 17 percent of worldwide share according to SEMI’s WWSEMS.

Aside from manufacturing capacity, Southeast Asia region is now extending its value proposition to IC design and R&D areas with more joint development projects between multi-national corporations (MNC) and local institutes. SEMI expects to see a more robust semiconductor ecosystem arise from the region as a result of these endeavors and as companies seek ready access to customers throughout Asia-Pacific and South Asia.

Currently, Singapore has 14 wafer fabrication plants, including the world’s top three wafer foundries.  Singapore also has 20 semiconductor assembly and test operations, including three of the world’s top six outsourced assembly and test companies. There are about 40 IC design centers, which comprise nine of the world’s “top 10” fabless IC design companies.

SEMICON Singapore, in its 20th year, will feature over 40 programs and forums to highlight the industry’s major technology trends, and investment and expansion opportunities in manufacturing.  Forum themes include: Market Trends Briefing, Lithography Technology, Assembly Packaging Technology, 2.5D/3D-IC, LED Manufacturing Technology, Product Test, and MEMS.  Attendees can save up to 30 percent on programs by registering before April 15.

Other special programs include a job fair, a SEMICON University Program, and both an OEM Sourcing Program ad a Suppliers Search Program. These programs demonstrate SEMI Singapore’s commitment to connecting the global semiconductor manufacturers to Singapore-based resources and professions.

Plessey today announced that samples of its Gallium Nitride (GaN) on silicon LED products are today available. These entry level products are the first LEDs manufactured on 6-inch GaN on silicon substrates to be commercially available anywhere in the world. Plessey is using its proprietary large diameter GaN on silicon process technology to manufacture the LEDs onits 6-inch MAGIC (Manufactured on GaN I/C) line at its Plymouth, England facility. The use of Plessey’s MAGIC GaN line using standard semiconductor manufacturing processing provides yield entitlements of greater than 95% and fast processing times providing a significant cost advantage over sapphire and silicon carbide based solutions for LEDs of similar quality.

The release of the availability of Plessey’s GaN on silicon LEDs was coincident with a visit to the Plessey Plymouth facility by the Rt. Hon. Dr. Vince Cable, MP, Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills and President of the Board of Trade. Business Secretary Vince Cable commented, “The government is supporting innovative companies like Plessey who are growing, creating jobs and exporting their products all over the world. That’s why we selected Plessey’s £3.25 million Regional Growth Fund bid for Government support, which will create 100 new, high tech and highly skilled jobs in the region.”

Michael LeGoff, CEO Plessey said, “We are very pleased to welcome Secretary of State Vince Cable today. The department of Business Innovation and Skills has been very supportive of our efforts to date and with the launch of our first range of LEDs today we are now looking towards aggressive growth in the solid state lighting markets.”

“Today is a significant step for us,” said Barry Dennington, Plessey’s COO. “From acquiring our first MOCVD reactor in August 2012 to having our first product in April 2013 is excellent progress. These entry level products will be used in indicating and accent lighting applications. We will continue to make progress in output efficiency and are on plan to release further improvements in light output throughout this year and into next. The operating and unit costs are on plan and we are seeing a number of routes to enhance our cost advantage over competing technologies.”

LEDs and the associated solid state lighting solutions are due to become the dominant form of lighting in all forms in within the next five years. Solid state lighting is an energy efficient eco-friendly technology that will save billions of tons of carbon emissions when fully implemented. There are also no recycling issues that fluorescent lighting poses with mercury content.

Gallium nitride has been described as “the most important semiconductor since silicon” and is used in energy-saving LED lighting. A new £1million (or US$1,530,700) growth facility will allow University of Cambridge researchers to further reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of LEDs, with potentially huge cost-saving implications.

A new facility for growing Gallium Nitride – the key material needed to make energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) – has opened in Cambridge, enabling researchers to expand and accelerate their pioneering work in the field.

Gallium Nitride LEDs are already used in traffic lights, bicycle lights, televisions, computer screens, car headlamps and other devices, but they are too expensive to be used widely in homes and offices. The main reason for this is that they are normally grown on expensive substrates, which pushes up the price of LED lightbulbs. The new Gallium Nitride growth reactor at Cambridge will allow researchers to further improve a method of growing low-cost LEDs on silicon substrates, reducing their cost by more than 50 percent and opening them up for more general use.

In addition, researchers are developing color-tunable LED lighting, which would have the quality of natural sunlight, bringing considerable health benefits to users.

University scientists are also starting to investigate the potential of Gallium Nitride in electronics, which it is thought could have similarly significant energy-saving consequences – perhaps cutting nationwide electricity consumption by a further 9 percent.

The reactor, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), was opened March 28, 2013 by David Willetts MP, the Minister for Universities and Science. It marks the latest chapter in a decade-long research project to make LEDs the go-to technology for lighting, led by Professor Sir Colin Humphreys in the University’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy.

In 2003, Humphreys and his team began experimenting with the possibility of growing Gallium Nitride (GaN) on silicon instead of costly sapphire and silicon carbide. After years of painstaking research, they finally developed a successful process, and in 2012 this was picked up by the British manufacturer, Plessey, which has already started to manufacture LEDs at its factory in Plymouth, based on the Cambridge technology. Plessey also hired three of Humphreys’ post-doctoral scientists to help transfer the process. It is the first time that LEDs have been manufactured in the UK.

Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said: "LEDs are highly energy efficient but expensive to produce, meaning their domestic use is limited. This excellent new facility will enable researchers to look at more cost-efficient ways to produce LEDs, saving money and benefitting the environment. It will also help keep the UK research base at the very forefront of advanced materials, which is one of the eight great technologies."

Making Gallium Nitride LEDs more cost-effective could unlock benefits far beyond energy saving alone. Humphreys is investigating the possibility of “smart lighting” – a system in which LED lights coupled to a sensor would be able to switch themselves on and off, or alter their brightness, relative to a user’s presence or levels of natural daylight in a room.

As their use increases, the beams from LEDs could be used to transmit information, for example from traffic lights to cars.

“It’s conceivable that the two could be developed to talk to one another,” Humphreys said. “Traffic reports, such as information about a road accident, could be sent to traffic light systems. They could then relay the details to drivers by transmitting it through the headlamps.”

Researchers also believe that LEDs could be used to purify water supplies in the developing world. Deep ultraviolet (UV) radiation kills bacteria and viruses. By putting a ring of ultraviolet LEDs around a water pipe at the point where it enters a home, it might be possible to kill off bacteria in the water as well as other undesirable organisms, such as mosquito larvae.

Further energy-saving with LEDs may also be possible. Humphreys and his team are currently investigating the so-called “green gap” problem which could improve the way in which they make white light. The LEDs currently used to make white light are in fact blue – the color is changed using a phosphor coating. This phosphor is, however, not completely energy efficient, and a better way of making white light could be by mixing blue, red and green LEDs together instead.

This, however, depends on resolving lower efficiency in green light compared with the other two colors. If this can be addressed, and LEDs made the standard for lighting nationwide, then it is estimated that there would be an additional electricity saving of 5 percent – on top of the 10 percent likely to be engendered by switching to LED technology in the first place.

 “If we can replicate devices with Gallium Nitride electronics, we believe that we could make them 40 percent more efficient,” he said. “That in itself would translate into a 9 percent electricity saving in the UK, if applied across the board.”

GaN LEDs

Gallium Nitride (GaN), grown on a silicon substrate, to manufacture light-emitting diodes. The material is critical to making LED lighting, which researchers and the Government agree could cut UK electricity consumption by 10-15 percent.

 Credit: University of Cambridge Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd of Seoul, South Korea has introduced a new lineup of Zhaga-compliant LED H-Series linear modules with high efficacy and light quality, as well as color consistency for use in a wide range of LED lighting applications including ambient lighting and linear fixtures.

“Our new Zhaga-compliant H-Series is well suited to be used in a variety of high-performance light fixtures,” says Jaap Schlejen, senior VP, LED lighting sales & marketing, at Samsung Electronics’s Device Solutions Division. The new LED module series is one of several launches in a series of new LED modules with high light performance and efficacy, says the firm.

The H-Series features luminous efficacy of 145lm/W, which is claimed to be the industry’s highest in the LED module product category. The new module’s correlated color temperature (CCT) of 5000K provides an improvement of about 40 percent over a typical T5 fluorescent lamp and an improvement of 50% over a T8 fluorescent lamp, says the firm.

The H-Series consists of four types of LED module, each with a different form factor and luminous flux for various market needs. Fixture makers can connect multiple modules together for variations in luminous flux, without a gap between the modules.

Veeco Instruments Inc. announced today that CEA-Leti, a research lab based in Grenoble, France, has selected Veeco’s TurboDisc K465i Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) system for its program with Aledia, its nanowire-LED partner.

Aledia is a start-up company spun out of the CEA-Leti labs in 2011 and based at the CEA site. It counts among its three founders two former CEA researchers, Xavier Hugon and Philippe Gilet. Aledia’s goal is to manufacture 3D nanowire-based LEDs for solid-state lighting applications on thin silicon wafer substrates, of 8 inches or greater in diameter, at a cost significantly below that of conventional planar LEDs. Nanowires are thin crystalline structures that, when electrically charged, can emit a broader spectrum of light than conventional LEDs, and can be grown on industry-standard silicon substrates. Aledia’s nanowire technology was originally developed at CEA-Leti, and Aledia and CEA-Leti continue to develop nanowire technology in close cooperation.

“We are confident that Veeco’s MOCVD system is the right equipment to help make this technology successful,” said Fabrice Geiger, head of CEA-Leti’s Silicon Technology Division.

According to Giorgio Anania, Aledia’s President and Chief Executive Officer, “The TurboDisc reactor will be an important element of our strategy to take this potentially game-changing technology towards the commercialization phase. In partnership with CEA-Leti, we selected Veeco because our analysis indicated that at this time their MOCVD systems showed the best financial returns for 8 inch wafer production on the market.”

The global LED lighting market will be worth $25.4 billion in 2013, representing 54% growth on the 2012 figure of $16.5, while the LED lighting penetration rate will also rise to 18.6%, according to a new DIGITIMES Research Special Report titled "Global high-brightness LED market forecast."

The report describes how the luminous efficacy of LEDs continues to rise, with manufacturers likely to be well ahead of the US Department of Energy’s (DoE) development targets of 129 lm/W for warm white light LEDs and 164 lm/W for cold white light LEDs.

LED lighting product prices are likely to drop by 20-25% in 2013, as LED component performance/price ratios rise from 2012’s 500 lm/US$ to 1,000 lm/US$ in 2013.

Looking further ahead to 2015, the US DoE targets are for LED component costs to drop 37% from 2013 levels, while 60W-equivalent LED bulb costs are to drop by 38% from 2013 levels by 2015. LED lighting prices would then be at a price point even more acceptable to general consumers.

Lighting policy in many countries is also critical to the development of LED lighting, and this effect has been most marked in the Asia region. For example, Japan now has the highest LED lighting market penetration rate of any region, with the rate set to rise to 73.8% by 2015; South Korea’s Korea Association for Photonics Industry Development (KAPID) projects that the country’s LED lighting industry will have an output value of US$7.8 billion by 2015, 5.6 times the figure for 2012; while China’s LED lighting market is growing by 30% per year, which will give the country nearly one third of total global output value for LED lighting in 2015.

All of these factors will drive major growth in the LED lighting market, which will beat even the significant gains forecast over the last one to two years. "In addition to the rise of LED TV applications, LED lighting will begin to replace conventional lighting technology in the market. LED lighting will take 38.6% of the global lighting market by 2015," predicts Jessie Lin, author of the report. DIGITIMES Research in fact projects that the global LED lighting market will be worth US$44.2 billion by 2015.

global lighting market