Category Archives: LED Packaging and Testing

Crystal IS, a developer of high-performance ultraviolet (UVC) LEDs, this week announced availability of Optan. The first commercial semiconductor based on native Aluminum Nitride (AIN) substrates, Optan provides a unique technology platform for increased detection sensitivity, essential for analytical and life sciences instrumentation—from monitoring of chemicals in pharma manufacturing to drinking water analysis.

The Optan product is a breakthrough for design engineers looking to overcome limitations associated with traditional UV lamps, including deuterium and xenon flash lamps. As an enabling technology, Optan allows developers to fully exploit the power of UV-based technology to improve productivity, increase accuracy and create greater flexibility in product designs.

“This is an exciting time for Crystal IS and an achievement for the semiconductor industry as a whole,” said Larry Felton, CEO of Crystal IS. “Optan will help instrument manufacturers build smaller, more powerful tools and products with a lower overall system cost. We look forward to the scientific and environmental contributions their new products will provide.”

The superior light output and spectral quality of the Optan UVC LED technology, made possible by the unique, low defect AIN substrate, delivers best-in-class reliability, and longer lifetimes, a game changer for life sciences and analytical instrumentation, including environmental monitoring.

Immediate use cases include:

  • HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography), a powerful tool in analysis for detecting chemicals and compounds in life sciences.
  • Spectrometers, used in multiple applications in testing and analysis across biotech, life sciences and environmental monitoring.
  • Water quality monitoring sensors, becoming increasingly important for detecting chemicals in water from fracking, water security and the use of treated wastewater.

 

The Optan LEDs are currently available in peak wavelengths from 250nm to 280nm and power bins from 0.5mW to 2mW, ideal for spectroscopic applications because of their high spectral quality and reliability. Full availability for all bins under 3mW is anticipated for next quarter with higher power bins (3-4mW) available this Fall, 2014.

Dow Corning today announced that its recently launched Dow Corning® MS-2002 Moldable White Reflector Silicone was the winner of the Non-Luminous Components, Specialty Hardware, Shades and Solar category at the 2014 LIGHTFAIR International Innovation Awards. This marks the third time in two years that Dow Corning’s Moldable Silicone product technology has garnered top recognition during LIGHTFAIR International’s (LFI) annual awards.

Held each year during LFI, the world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference, the award competition recognizes the best lighting-related applications and designs introduced over the past year. Judged by an independent panel of lighting industry professionals, MS-2002 Moldable White Reflector Silicone beat out 13 competitors to win its category.

“Cutting-edge LED design begin with cutting-edge LED materials, and MS-2002 Moldable White Reflector Silicone is helping to redefine the performance boundaries for next-generation LED lighting,” said Hugo da Silva, global industry director, LED Lighting at Dow Corning. “This new highly moldable reflective material is already making a clear impact on the LED industry, as demonstrated by its top spot among this year’s LFI awards. MS-2002 Silicone’s impact is further evident from the positive customer feedback on its exceptional performance and durability in a wide array of demanding, high-heat LED applications.”

Launched in late 2013, MS-2002 Silicone is a bright white material that extends its excellent photo-thermal stability and high-moldability to the reflective elements of LED lamp and luminaire applications. It targets reflectivity as high as 98 percent to help further boost light output from LED devices, improve overall energy efficiency and prolong device reliability. The new technology also provides excellent moldability to enable complex shapes, micro optical features, multifunctional parts and even undercuts once difficult to achieve with plastics or glass.

MS-2002 Moldable White Reflector Silicone can be easily overmolded onto transparent silicones and enables such LED concepts as mixing chambers for superior light output vs. competitive materials. The material offers outstanding mechanical, thermal and optical stability at temperatures exceeding 150° C where conventional LED materials, such as epoxies, polycarbonates and acrylics often yellow or degrade. This is critical as LED sources are increasingly expected to deliver more intense white light from comparatively smaller package sizes, and as customers seek smaller designs with higher luminous flux, which also drives up temperatures at the device level.

“Receiving this LFI award is a true honor,” da Silva added. “Not only does it recognize our contribution to an increasingly important market, but also spotlights our commitment to our LED customers and the industry as a whole.”

This year’s award for MS-2002 Silicone follows top recognitions for Dow Corning at last year’s LIGHTFAIR show.

LIGHTFAIR International is the world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference. Held recently at the Las Vegas Convention Center on June 3-5, the event sets the global stage each year for lighting, design and technology innovation.

Samsung Electronics today announced that it has improved the light quality of its LED packages and modules based on a 90 CRI (Color Rendering Index) for use in advanced lighting applications. Samsung is showcasing these LED components at the LIGHTFAIR International trade show exhibition being held here from June 3rd through 5th.

“With our improved color rendering, Samsung’s LED packages and modules now provide LED lighting makers with light quality that far surpasses that of conventional lighting applications, while adding to the energy efficiency of our LED lighting line-up,” said Bangwon Oh, senior vice president of strategic marketing team, LED Business, Samsung Electronics. “With more than 90 CRI, the enhanced color reproducibility of our best product platforms will make them even more attractive to lighting designers worldwide.”

Samsung’s LED product platforms include mid-power, high-power and chip-on-board (COB) packages as well as LED modules. With the improved CRI, Samsung LM561B and other mid-power LED packages can be used in a wider range of retrofit LED bulbs and downlights by reproducing colors comparable to those seen under natural sunlight. In addition, the improved high power LED LH351 series is suitable for MR, PAR and other spotlights that require high color rendering, along with high light output.

Samsung’s LED modules enhanced with 90 CRI include the LT-A302 module comprised of mid-power LED packages, and the SLE series, which uses COB-type packages. The LT-A302 is a linear, lens-attached module (LAM) with a thin, 21 millimeter-wide form factor. The SLE series modules are suitable for spotlights and track lighting that prioritize high light output.

Seoul Semiconductor this week announced the release of a new generation of Acrich MJT 5050 LEDs, with high lumen output, reliability, and cost performance optimized for the outdoor lighting market.

This new Acrich series has dimensions of 5.0mm x 5.0mm delivering a typical luminous flux of 180 lumens at 20mA, 64V, 25° C, 5000K and can be driven to a maximum current of 60mA delivering up to 440lm.

seoul semi led package

The new Acrich series delivers an unprecedented combination of high lumen output, efficacy, outstanding reliability and lm/$ all in one package. This high performance package results in designs where fewer LEDs are used, which leads to smaller and lighter fixtures enabling cost savings on a system level. This Acrich series delivers high performance without sacrificing on reliability or cost. It is an ideal LED for the outdoor lighting market where high efficacy and lifetime are critical.

Utilizing Seoul Semiconductor’s proven and reliable high voltage architecture, Acrich MJT “Multi-Junction chip Technology,” the Acrich LED eliminates the tradeoff between size and efficacy. Designers can take advantage of the high efficiency of high-voltage DC drivers or eliminate the driver by driving the LEDs directly of AC using the Acrich IC.

“In addition to high efficacy and reliability the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is an important metric for the street and area lighting market,” said Seoul Semiconductor Executive Vice President of Lighting sales division, Jay Kim. “This product will enable the market to come up with the next generation of high quality, efficient and competitively priced LED retrofit lamps. ” He added “The payback period especially for streetlights can be significantly reduced with new Acrich LED without compromising on reliability or efficiency.”

In the future, Seoul Semiconductor will introduce more products to penetrate the outdoor area lighting market.

Crystal IS, a developer of the most effective UVC LEDs, today announced the appointment of John Gartner as its first vice president of operations. Gartner brings more than thirty years of experience in manufacturing and engineering, including establishing and growing manufacturing operations for clean and reliable energy solutions. His expertise and experience will help transition Crystal IS from R&D to a manufacturing company poised to become the market leader in UVC LEDs for life sciences, environmental monitoring and disinfection.

“It is clear that Crystal IS has committed to moving from R&D to commercial product development,” said John Gartner, vice president of operations, Crystal IS. “I’m thrilled to be part of the team leading the company in this exciting time.”

In conjunction with the addition of Gartner, Crystal IS continues to expand the Green Island facility preparing it for full scale production and shipping of soon to be announced Optan product with the addition of:

  • a raw material furnace as well as three additional furnaces and a chiller to double manufacturing capacity
  • a new lab and production equipment for fine wafer polishing
  • moving fabrication in-house to the AK Fuji facility
  • twenty-three percent employee growth across the organization in areas including application engineering, quality, customer support and product marketing

“Our move from R&D to commercial production was inevitable,” said Larry Felton, chief executive officer. “Appointing John Gartner as our first vice president of operations and expanding our manufacturing capacity demonstrates our commitment to commercializing our superior technology and getting our breakthrough products to customers.”

As high data rate applications put more strain on LTE wireless networks, innovative solutions such as small cell base stations (BTS) and carrier aggregation will be needed to bridge the bandwidth gap in high traffic areas. In response to broader bandwidth demand, Cree, Inc. introduces a family of GaN HEMT RF transistors that delivers industry-leading bandwidth and high efficiency performance to support today’s busy LTE networks. Built on plastic dual-flat no-leads (DFN) surface mount packages, the new Cree GaN HEMT RF transistors also provide the affordability needed to replace less efficient Si or GaAs transistors in these applications.

“The trend of ever-increasing amounts of data-rich applications will drive the need for small cell deployment to improve wireless network performance,” said Tom Dekker, director of sales and marketing, RF Business Unit, Cree, Inc. “Our industry-leading GaN technology will provide the desired bandwidth, flexibility, efficiency and affordability our small cell customers demand.”

The new GaN HEMT DFN product family includes 28V and 50V, 15W and 30W unmatched transistors. The frequency-agile transistors are capable of operating at a range between 700 MHz to 3.8 GHz instantaneous, and may be optimized for band splits. Multi-band capability creates design flexibility that helps small cell OEMs speed their time to market and allows operators to reconfigure the same small cell unit for different market requirements.

In high efficiency applications, Cree GaN HEMT RF transistors help reduce the size and weight of LTE cellular network transmitters and simplify thermal management. These efficiency gains generate significant energy savings in operational costs. Cree developed Doherty reference design CDPA27045 utilizing 15W and 30W HEMT DFN transistors to demonstrate the technology’s superior efficiency. The design delivers approximately 50 percent drain efficiency at 10W average power under a LTE 7.5dB peak-to-average ratio signal, and covers 2.5-2.7 GHz instantaneous RF bandwidth while offering 16dB of linear gain.

The new family of GaN HEMT DFN RF transistors is based on Cree’s qualified 50V, 0.4µm gate length process.

Veeco Instruments Inc. (Nasdaq:VECO) has appointed Shubham Maheshwari, 42, as its new Executive Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Mr. Maheshwari replaces David D. Glass, who announced his retirement from Veeco last December.

Mr. Maheshwari brings more than 20 years of experience in engineering and finance to Veeco. He most recently served as Chief Financial Officer of OnCore, a global manufacturer of electronic products in the medical, aerospace, defense and industrial markets. Prior to this role, he held various finance roles including Senior Vice President Finance, Treasury, Tax and Investor Relations at Spansion, a global leader in Flash memory based embedded system solutions. Mr. Maheshwari helped lead Spansion’s emergence from bankruptcy to become a successful public company. Prior to Spansion, he spent over ten years at KLA-Tencor, a global semiconductor capital equipment manufacturing company, in various senior level corporate development and finance roles, including Vice President of Corporate Development and Corporate Controller. During his tenure at KLA-Tencor, he worked on over $1 billion in acquisition transactions.

He holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India, an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Kansas State University, and an MBA from the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania.

John Peeler, Veeco’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, commented, “Shubham brings an ideal mix of highly relevant financial leadership experience to Veeco. I am confident he will hit the ground running to help take Veeco to the next level of performance. I’m extremely pleased that Shubham has joined our leadership team.”

“Veeco is a great match for me and I’m excited to come on board,” commented Mr. Maheshwari. “Veeco has done an impressive job managing through an extended downturn, but I think the best is still in front of the Company. I look forward to helping to strengthen the business and capitalizing on the significant growth opportunities ahead.”

GaN-on-Si is entering in production. Under this context, what is the patent situation? KnowMade and Yole Développement decided to collaborate and combine their expertise to perform a patent analysis dedicated to the GaN-on-Si substrate market: GaN on Silicon Substrate Patent Investigation.
Under this report, the companies detail the technological challenges and known solutions. They provide an overview of the main players and up to 2020 market volume & revenue forecasts. Analysts give a deep understanding of the IP landscape and identify key patents per technology issues or patent assignee.

“GaN-on-Si technology appeared naturally as an alternative to GaN- on-Sapphire, the main stream technology for LED applications. Today, despite potential cost benefits, the mass adoption of GaN-on-Si technology for LED applications remains unclear,” explains Dr Hong Lin, Technology & Market Analyst, Compound Semiconductors & Power Electronics at Yole Développement.

Most major LED makers have a patenting activity related to GaN-on-Si technology, but so far, few have made it the core of their strategy and technology roadmap. Contrary to the LED industry, Yole Développement and KnowMade expect GaN-on-Si to be widely adopted by power electronics and RF applications because of its lower cost and CMOS compatibility.

Screen Shot 2014-04-24 at 8.00.00 PM

The growth of GaN-on-silicon substrate was first reported in the early-1970s (T. L. Chu et al., J. Electrochemical Society, Vol. 118, page 1200), since the early 1990s more and more academics and industrials have been involved in developing this technology. GaN-on-Si technology is now poised for a list of technical challenges. The high lattice mismatch between GaN and Si results in a high defect density in epitaxial layers (dislocations). The high thermal expansion coefficient (TCE) mismatch between GaN and Si leads to a large tensile stress during cooling from the growth temperature to room temperature. The tensile stress causes film cracking and a concave bending of the wafer (warpage). These factors combine to make both dislocation density and crack/warpage reduction a challenging task.

Under GaN-On Si Substrate Patent Investigation report, Yole Développement and KnowMade cover patents published worldwide up to December, 2013.

“The patents addressing the above mentioned challenges have been selected, and an in-depth analysis of patent holders and corresponding patented technologies is provided. This report does not include patents related to active layers or GaN-based devices,” explains Dr Nicolas Baron, CEO & Co-founder, KnowMade.

Fundamental patents describing a gallium-nitride-based compound semiconductor grown on a silicon substrate were filed before the 1990s with the most significant assigned to TDK and Fujitsu. In the early 1990s, Toyoda Gosei and the University of Nagoya filed the first concepts of a buffer layer for improving the crystallinity of GaN. Those fundamental patents have been followed by an ever increasing number of applications since 1995 as more companies competed in GaN-on-Si technology to meet the technological challenges, the market demand and to lower manufacturing costs. Currently, the patented technologies reflect the significant improvements that have been made on key material issues such as dislocation density reduction and stress management for preventing cracks and warpage of the wafer.

According to Yole Développement & KnowMade analysis, GaN-on-Si IP is mature enough to initiate mass production.

Intermolecular, Inc. today announced that Epistar Corp. and Intermolecular have signed a multi-year extension of their existing collaborative development program (CDP) and royalty-bearing IP licensing agreement to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of Epistar’s light emitting diode (LED) devices.

Under the terms of the agreement, which was initially established in April 2013, Epistar and Intermolecular engineers will continue to work together to leverage Intermolecular’s High Productivity Combinatorial (HPC) technology platform to dramatically accelerate development and manufacturing qualification of novel materials and processes for advanced LED products.

“Epistar is leveraging Intermolecular’s HPC methodology and technology in order to accelerate R&D experimentation as we bring more advanced, higher-performing LED devices to market for our customers,” stated Carson Hsieh, vice president of R&D at Epistar. “Our CDP with Intermolecular helped to significantly increase the performance of one of our LED products during development, and we are now in the process of implementing that technology in production. In the coming years we expect our continuing relationship with Intermolecular to support further advancements in our technology roadmap.”

“Increasing LED efficiency is the key to reducing LED system cost and enabling widespread adoption of more innovative lighting products. We are pleased to enter into this multi-year agreement extension with Epistar—a leader in LED manufacturing—to support their product innovation strategy through accelerated materials development and LED device integration,” stated Sandeep Nijhawan, senior vice president and general manager, Clean Energy Group at Intermolecular.

Intermolecular’s mission is to improve R&D efficiency in the semiconductor and clean energy industries through collaborations that use its HPC platform, which allows R&D experimentation to be performed at speeds up to 100 times faster than traditional methods.

Dow Corning filed a complaint through its Chinese subsidiary and licensee with the Shanghai First Intermediate Court. The complaint alleges that Beijing KMT Technology Co., Ltd infringed Dow Corning’s Chinese patent by manufacturing and selling products using proprietary Dow Corning silicone technology under the Beijing KMT label.

The patent is part of Dow Corning’s diverse and multilayered intellectual property (IP) portfolio protecting its high refractive index (RI) phenyl-based optical silicone encapsulants, which offer numerous high-value benefits to LED devices. These benefits include improved light output, excellent mechanical protection of LED components and enduring gas barrier properties for enhanced reliability.

“Dow Corning will always rigorously defend its intellectual property to ensure that our customers continue to receive the highest quality products and reliability we can provide to help them stay competitive in today’s fast-growing LED market,” said Kaz Maruyama, global industry director, Lighting Solutions, Dow Corning.

For nearly 15 years, Dow Corning has invested aggressively to develop optical silicone technologies and products designed to advance applications along the entire LED value chain – in China and across the globe. Among these materials are Dow Corning’s phenyl-based high RI silicone encapsulants, which the company began innovating over a decade ago in Japan where the technology was first patented. Additional patents for these advanced optical materials quickly followed in Korea, the United States, European Union, Taiwan, Malaysia and other countries. Chinese Patent asserted in the complaint against Beijing KMT, was granted on April 2, 2008.

“Asia currently leads the market transition to LEDs for general lighting, driven especially by swift penetration in China,” said Maruyama. “Supply chain integrity and consistent material quality are both key factors in ensuring that LEDs offer a credible, cost-effective alternative to conventional lighting. It takes only a few failed applications to raise doubts about the technology’s viability for future investment and adoption. Consequently, industry-wide defense and support of proven, patented and cutting-edge LED solutions such as Dow Corning’s OE Series helps validate the competitive value of LED lighting, and advances the interests of all.”