Category Archives: LEDs

SEMICON Europa will feature semiconductor device technology for a wide range of applications, equipment, materials, services and will provide access to critical information relative to device manufacturing, partnership opportunities, next-generation fab requirements  and funding. The event will be held in France (7-9 October in Grenoble) for the first time with an expanded exhibition (25 percent larger). The opportunities and challenges in microelectronics will be discussed in more than 70 sessions with 300 speakers.

Global capital spending on semiconductor equipment is projected to grow  21.1 percent in 2014 and 21.0 percent in 2015. According to the August edition of the SEMI World Fab Forecast, semiconductor equipment spending will increase from $29 billion in 2013 to $42 billion in 2015.

SEMI projects back-to-back years of double-digit growth in Europe and Mid-East semiconductor equipment sales. The SEMI outlook forecasts that the European/Mid-East semiconductor equipment market will grow 11 percent in 2014 (reaching $1.9 billion) and 100 percent in 2015 (reaching $3.8 billion). In terms of percentage of worldwide sales, the Europe/MidEast region’s share is expected to increase from 5.9 percent in 2013 to 9.0 percent in 2015.

The event offers several semiconductor Front-End manufacturing highlights, including the 18th Fab Managers Forum, which is themed “Improving Productivity for Mature Fabs.” Speakers from IMEC, Infineon AG, and Bosch will present on Internet of Things, Automation Level in Fabs, and Smart Connected Sensor Devices. The prospect for future 450mm wafer processing, as well other technical and business challenges in semiconductor and related micro and nano-electronics industries, will be addressed at SEMICON Europa.

In the two-day special program, “450mm Innovations and Synergies for Smaller Diameters,” leaders will present on progress, research, and collaboration on the future of the semiconductor manufacturing. The session includes presentations from Global 450 Consortium, European Commission, ASM Europe BV, and RECIF Technologies.

In addition, a Secondary Equipment Session, themed “Fundamental to European Competitiveness?”, features presentations from  Infineon Technologies AG, STMicroelectronics, and Robert Bosch GmbH.

Other conference programs at SEMICON Europa will explore critical issues in Fab Management, Advanced Packaging, 3DIC, Test and MEMS. In addition, SEMICON Europa this year features a special focus on Electronic Applications (Imaging Conference and Nanoelectronics for Healthcare Conference) and Electronic Components (Low Power Conference and Power Electronics Conference).

Now in its third decade, SEMICON Europa’s new location this year leverages the growing strengths of Grenoble’s technology businesses, academia and institutions  to showcase a diverse array of products, solutions and opportunities spanning the most advanced innovations in the European microelectronics industry.  For more information on exhibition opportunities, visit www.semiconeuropa.org.  For more information on SEMI Europe, visit: www.semi.org/eu.

SEMICON Europa 2014 will be held on 7-9 October in conjunction with the Plastics Electronics Conference and Exhibition (www.plastic-electronics.org) to showcase Europe’s most innovative companies, institutions and people.

Graphene quantum dots created at Rice University grab onto graphene platelets like barnacles attach themselves to the hull of a boat. But these dots enhance the properties of the mothership, making them better than platinum catalysts for certain reactions within fuel cells.

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour created dots known as GQDs from coal last year and have now combined these nanoscale dots with microscopic sheets of graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon, to create a hybrid that could greatly cut the cost of generating energy with fuel cells.

The research is the subject of a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

The lab discovered boiling down a solution of GQDs and graphene oxide sheets (exfoliated from common graphite) combined them into self-assembling nanoscale platelets that could then be treated with nitrogen and boron. The hybrid material combined the advantages of each component: an abundance of edges where chemical reactions take place and excellent conductivity between GQDs provided by the graphene base. The boron and nitrogen collectively add more catalytically active sites to the material than either element would add alone.

“The GQDs add to the system an enormous amount of edge, which permits the chemistry of oxygen reduction, one of the two needed reactions for operation in a fuel cell,” Tour said. “The graphene provides the conductive matrix required. So it’s a superb hybridization.”

The Tour lab’s material outperformed commercial platinum/carbon hybrids commonly found in fuel cells. The material showed an oxygen reduction reaction of about 15 millivolts more in positive onset potential – the start of the reaction – and 70 percent larger current density than platinum-based catalysts.

The materials required to make the flake-like hybrids are much cheaper, too, Tour said. “The efficiency is better than platinum in terms of oxygen reduction, permitting one to sidestep the most prohibitive hurdle in fuel-cell generation — the cost of the precious metal,” he said.

Rice graduate student Huilong Fei is the paper’s lead author. Co-authors are graduate students Ruquan Ye, Gonglan Ye, Yongji Gong, Zhiwei Peng and Errol Samuel; research technician Xiujun Fan; and Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry and chair of the Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, all of Rice.

Tour is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of computer science.

The Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and its MURI program supported the research.

Quantum Materials Corp today announced that it is scaling volume production of photoactive quantum dots for use in next-generation photovoltaic solar power technologies. While offering numerous advantages for solar power generation, the high cost and difficulty of producing large quantities of quantum dots with which to develop thin film solar cells has until now kept them from commercial utilization and acceptance. The company is also seeking partners for pilot thin-film quantum dot solar cell factories with Quantum Materials’ automated quantum dot production system supplying the material necessary to support daily runs of continuous roll-to-roll thin film production.

The environment for solar advances is reaching an investment capital ‘tipping point’ as highlighted by the recent pledge by the Rockefellers, who made their vast fortune on oil, to divest a total of $50 billion from fossil fuel investments and focus on supporting alternative energy solutions. They have joined some 650 individuals and 180 institutions, including 50 new foundations, which hold over $50 billion in total assets, that have pledged to divest from supporting fossil fuels over five years since the divestment movement launched three years ago.

“Cost-effective volume production of photoactive quantum dots will create the foundation for invigorating capital investment and adoption of solar energy technologies as thin-film photovoltaics drive down relative cost-per-watt ratios,” said Quantum Materials Founder and CEO Stephen Squires. “Without subsidies solar energy has not been an attractive investment for business and residential markets and as a result adoption in countries that have not aggressively subsidized solar, like the United States, has been stillborn since 2008. With our recent patent award and patent acquisitions we now have the IP protection underlying our high volume photoactive quantum dots production processes that will drive significant cost reductions for thin film solar cells and increase non-subsidized solar energy adoption.”

The recent issuance of Quantum Materials’ Republic of China (Taiwan) patent – ‘Hybrid Organic Solar Cells with Photoactive Semiconductor Nanoparticles Enclosed in Surface Modifiers’ – combined with other recent patents acquired from Bayer AG provide Quantum Materials the robust intellectual property protection needed to bring their optimized photoactive quantum dot solar cell materials to market. The Bayer patents incorporate broad descriptions of materials, fundamental design of quantum dot solar cells and processes for manufacturing them and enhance Quantum Material’s technology portfolio in printing Quantum Dot displays, solar cells and other printed electronic devices by gravure or high-speed roll-to-roll. The company is seeking partners with which to utilize proprietary materials and processes to drive next generation thin-film solutions.

Today, SEMI opens registration for the SEMICON Japan 2014 exposition and programs through its website at www.semiconjapan.org. SEMICON Japan 2014, Japan’s largest exhibition for the microelectronics manufacturing supply chain, will take place at Tokyo Big Sight in the Tokyo metropolitan area on December 3-5. For the first time, SEMICON Japan will feature a show-within-a-show  “World of IoT” to showcase applications and technologies of companies enabling the IoT revolution, including Toyota Motor, Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Cisco.

“Japan is a key region for the semiconductor industry, with the largest installed fab capacity globally, according to the recent SEMI Fab Forecast report,” said Osamu Nakamura, president of SEMI Japan. “With more than fifty 200mm production fabs for MCU, MEMS, analog and power devices, and with a strong supply chain producing over 50 percent of global semiconductor materials and approximately 35 percent of the global semiconductor equipment, Japan is at the forefront of semiconductor technology. Japan is a major platform for the promising new Internet of Things (IoT) technology, leveraging its strength that will help drive our industry’s growth over the next decade.”

While IoT technologies have begun to emerge in the market, the most exciting technologies are yet to come, but will require collaboration across the electronics supply chain to make them a reality. World of IoT will facilitate the communication across the IoT ecosystem from silicon to applications. The growth of IoT applications presents new opportunities for existing fabs, as well as materials, metrology, secondary equipment, productivity solutions, components and sub-systems, test, and packaging technologies.

SEMICON Japan 2014 will also expand its programming for visitors with four stages on the show floor — TechSTAGE North and South,TechXPOT East and West, and SEMICON Japan SuperTHEATER in the conference tower — to provide more than 100 hours of technical and business sessions.  The sessions on the stages and the theater are free for pre-registered SEMICON Japan 2014 exposition attendees.

Programs on SEMICON Japan SuperTHEATER will include:

  • Semiconductor Executive Forum – Toshiba and Applied Materials will present their perspectives on technology and business innovations.
  • IT Forum – Microsoft, Line and Google will discuss the future in terms of big data and IoT.
  • IoT Forum – CISCO, Sony and Intel will present their business and technology strategies for the IoT era.
  • 2.5D/3D IC Forum – ASE, Xilinx and Toshiba will discuss the 2.5D/3D architectures.
  • Manufacturing Innovation Forum – Intel, IBM and NGR will discuss the innovations required for sub-10nm chip manufacturing.

Japanese-English simultaneous translation will be available for the sessions on SEMICON Japan SuperTHEATER.

SEMICON Japan 2014 is the place for the latest industry insights and networking opportunities. SEMICON Japan 2014 also provides exhibitors an excellent opportunity to meet major device and equipment companies —  Advantest, Ebara, Dainippon Screen Mfg., Disco, Tokyo Electron, Nikon, Texas Instruments, Hitachi High-Tech, Murata Machinery and TowerJazz Panasonic Semiconductor — through the Supplier Search Program.

Flexible LEDs


September 24, 2014

Flexible light-emitting diode (LED) displays and solar cells crafted with inorganic compound semiconductor micro-rods are moving one step closer to reality, thanks to graphene and the work of a team of researchers in Korea.

Currently, most flexible electronics and optoelectronics devices are fabricated using organic materials. But inorganic compound semiconductors such as gallium nitride (GaN) can provide plenty of advantages over organic materials for use in these devices — including superior optical, electrical and mechanical properties.

One major obstacle that has so far prevented the use of inorganic compound semiconductors in these types of applications was the difficulty of growing them on flexible substrates.

In the journal APL Materials, from AIP Publishing, a team of Seoul National University (SNU) researchers led by Professor Gyu-Chul Yi describes their work growing GaN micro-rods on graphene to create transferrable LEDs and enable the fabrication of bendable and stretchable devices.

“GaN microstructures and nanostructures are garnering attention within the research community as light-emitting devices because of their variable-color light emission and high-density integration properties,” explained Yi. “When combined with graphene substrates, these microstructures also show excellent tolerance for mechanical deformation.”

Why choose graphene for substrates? Ultrathin graphene films consist of weakly bonded layers of hexagonally arranged carbon atoms held together by strong covalent bonds. This makes graphene an ideal substrate “because it provides the desired flexibility with excellent mechanical strength — and it’s also chemically and physically stable at temperatures in excess of 1,000°C,” said Yi.

It’s important to note that for the GaN micro-rod growth, the very stable and inactive surface of graphene offers a small number of nucleation sites for GaN growth, which would enhance three-dimensional island growth of GaN micro-rods on graphene.

To create the actual GaN microstructure LEDs on the graphene substrates, the team uses a catalyst-free metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) process they developed back in 2002.

“Among the technique’s key criteria, it’s necessary to maintain high crystallinity, control over doping, formation of heterostructures and quantum structures, and vertically aligned growth onto underlying substrates,” Yi says.

When the team put the bendability and reliability of GaN micro-rod LEDs fabricated on graphene to the test, they found that “the resulting flexible LEDs showed intense electroluminescence (EL) and were reliable — there was no significant degradation in optical performance after 1,000 bending cycles,” noted Kunook Chung, the article’s lead author and a graduate student in SNU’s Physics Department.

This represents a tremendous breakthrough for next-generation electronics and optoelectronics devices — enabling the use of large-scale and low-cost manufacturing processes.

“By taking advantage of larger-sized graphene films, hybrid heterostructures can be used to fabricate various electronics and optoelectronics devices such as flexible and wearable LED displays for commercial use,” said Yi.

Pixelligent Technologies announced today that it has been selected for a Department of Energy (DOE) solid-state-lighting award to support the continued development of its OLED lighting application. The details of the award can be viewed on the DOE SSL website. Pixelligent and its partner OLEDWorks were selected as one of only nine awardees nationwide for this $1.25 million DOE award.

“This is the second OLED lighting award we have received from the DOE in partnership with OLEDWorks, which clearly demonstrates our leadership position in developing the next generation materials required to accelerate the commercialization of OLED lighting,” said Craig Bandes, President & CEO of Pixelligent Technologies.  “We are proud to have been selected by the DOE for this highly competitive grant that, when combined with our internal investments, will provide the resources required to optimize our OLED lighting application,” said Gregory Cooper PhD, Founder & CTO of Pixelligent Technologies.

The goal of this project is to develop a novel internal light extraction design that improves the light extraction efficiency of OLED lighting devices by more than 200%, without negatively impacting the device voltage, efficacy, or angular color dependence.

“This federal grant reflects the type of common sense investments we should be making to help our economy rebound by boosting U.S. manufacturing and high-tech innovation,” said Congressman Ruppersberger of Maryland’s Second District. “The fact that one of Baltimore’s own companies was selected and will be bringing jobs back to the city is icing on the cake. Pixelligent is an impressive and growing company, and I am proud that they have chosen the Second District to call home.”

In the LED packaging world, a wind of change is blowing. A LED TV crisis, and new Chinese players have totally modified the LED industry and its supply chain. Under this context, with a high competitive environment, new challenges have been identified by Yole Développement (Yole) analysts: efficacy improvement, cost decrease. To answer to the LED market needs, companies have today to innovate their technologies and implement new solutions like Flip Chip for LED packaging.

highpowerled_breakdown_yole_sept.2014

“In 2013, LED based on Flip Chip technology represented 11 percent (in volume) of the overall high power LED market; such market share should reach 24 percent (in volume as well) by 2020”, explains Pars Mukish, Senior Market and Technology Analyst, LED, OLED & Compound Semiconductors, at Yole (Source: LED Packaging 2014 report, to be released end of September 2014).

At the end of September, the 4th International LED professional Symposium +Expo (LpS 2014) will take place for the second time. Located in Bregenz, Austria and targeting industrials and researchers involved in LED design and engineering, the symposium is a three-day event including conferences, workshops, networking and exhibition.

At LpS 2014, Yole will present its latest analysis, with a special focus on LED chip manufacturing and packaging. During his presentation, Pars Mukish from Yole, will highlight the recent developments dedicated to LED chip manufacturing and packaging. Yole’s analyst will detail main market trends, emerging technologies and technical challenges including packaging process steps and supply chain.

All these results are part of two technology & market reports, LED Front-End Manufacturing Trends (released in May 2014) and LED Packaging that will be released end of September 2014.

“At Yole, we are daily working with the key players of the LED industry, to understand and analyze recent developments on manufacturing process and packaging solutions. Our objective is to evaluate the impact of the LED penetration rate in the solid state lighting market,” explains Pars Mukish.

LpS 2014 is a 60-lecture program and welcomes 1,300 visitors.

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.35 billion in orders worldwide in August 2014 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.04, according to the August EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.   A book-to-bill of 1.04 means that $104 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.

The three-month average of worldwide bookings in August 2014 was $1.35 billion. The bookings figure is 5.0 percent lower than the final July 2014 level of $1.42 billion, and is 26.5 percent higher than the August 2013 order level of $1.06 billion.

The three-month average of worldwide billings in August 2014 was $1.29 billion. The billings figure is 2.0 percent lower than the final July 2014 level of $1.32 billion, and is 19.5 percent higher than the August 2013 billings level of $1.08 billion.

“The SEMI Book-to-Bill ratio has been at or above parity for 11 consecutive months, and both current month bookings and billings continue to trend well above 2013 levels,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “Strong equipment spending growth for the year is observed across the fab and test and assembly segments.”

The SEMI book-to-bill is a ratio of three-month moving averages of worldwide bookings and billings for North American-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers. Billings and bookings figures are in millions of U.S. dollars.

Billings
(3-mo. avg)

Bookings
(3-mo. avg)

Book-to-Bill
March 2014

$1,225.5

$1,297.7

1.06
April 2014

$1,403.2

$1,443.0

1.03
May 2014

$1,407.8

$1,407.0

1.00
June 2014

$1,327.5

$1,455.0

1.10
July 2014 (final)

$1,319.1

$1,417.1

1.07
August 2014 (prelim)

$1,293.3

$1,346.2

1.04

Source: SEMI, September 2014

The data contained in this release were compiled by David Powell, Inc., an independent financial services firm, without audit, from data submitted directly by the participants. SEMI and David Powell, Inc. assume no responsibility for the accuracy of the underlying data.

The data are contained in a monthly Book-to-Bill Report published by SEMI. The report tracks billings and bookings worldwide of North American-headquartered manufacturers of equipment used to manufacture semiconductor devices, not billings and bookings of the chips themselves. The Book-to-Bill report is one of three reports included with the SEMI Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS).

Researchers from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the University of Oklahoma have found a new way to control the properties of quantum dots, those tiny chunks of semiconductor material that glow different colors depending on their size. Quantum dots, which are so small they start to exhibit atom-like quantum properties, have a wide range of potential applications, from sensors, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells, to fluorescent tags for biomedical imaging and qubits in quantum computing.

This image shows the experimental set-up researchers used to analyze the behavior of quantum dots placed on metal oxides. A laser illuminated the quantum dots to make them glow and a spectrometer was used to analyze the light they emitted. Credit: Seyed Sadeghi/ University of Alabama, Huntsville

This image shows the experimental set-up researchers used to analyze the behavior of quantum dots placed on metal oxides. A laser illuminated the quantum dots to make them glow and a spectrometer was used to analyze the light they emitted. Credit: Seyed Sadeghi/ University of Alabama, Huntsville

A key property of quantum dots that makes them so useful is their fluorescence. Scientists can “tune” quantum dots to emit a specific color of light by adjusting their size — small dots glow blue and large dots glow red. However, the dots’ ability to glow can change over time with exposure to light and air.

Seyed Sadeghi, a physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, wondered if it would be possible to better control how quantum dots react to their environment. His team had previously found that placing quantum dots of a certain type on nanometer-thin layers of chromium and aluminum oxides significantly altered the dots’ behavior: the aluminum oxide increased their emission efficiency, while the chromium oxide increased the dots’ degradation rate when exposed to air. The researchers decided to extend their investigations to quantum dots with different structures.

Quantum dots come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials. For Sadeghi and his colleagues’ most recent studies, published in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing, the researchers probed the behavior of four different types of commercially available quantum dots. Some of the quantum dots had protective shells, while others did not. Additionally, some of the dots had cores made of binary materials (two types of semiconductors), while others had ternary material cores (three types of semiconductors). All of the quantum dots had been manufactured by chemical synthesis.

The researchers found that ultrathin aluminum oxide could make quantum dots glow brighter and that the effect was much more significant for quantum dots without protective shells. They also found that while quantum dots with both binary and ternary cores shrink after reacting with the oxygen in air, ternary core dots placed on aluminum oxide glowed brighter despite the shrinkage. This observation surprised the researchers, Sadeghi said, and while they don’t yet have an explanation for the difference, they are continuing to study it.

“The results of these studies can serve to enhance emission efficiency of quantum dots, which is an important feature for many applications such as light emitting devices, sensors, detectors, photovoltaic devices, and the investigation of a wide range of quantum and nano-scale physical phenomena,” Sadeghi said. Quantum dots have already helped increase the efficiencies of many optical devices, he noted, and the further development and application of quantum dots’ unique properties, including in the fields of biological imaging and medicine, continues to be a prime focus of scientific study. As a next step in their own research, Sadeghi and his colleagues plan to investigate how metal oxides might affect the behavior of quantum dots when they are close to metallic nanoparticles.

Soraa, a developer of GaN on GaN LED technology, announced today new psychophysical research proving that whiteness and color rendering have a strong effect on the perception of energy-efficient LED lighting. The study was approved by an Institutional Review Board and led by Kevin Houser at Penn State University.

Compared with conventional blue-based LEDs, study participants overwhelmingly preferred the whiteness and color rendering of Soraa’s full visible spectrum lamps with Violet-Emission 3-Phosphor (VP3) technology. Like conventional electric light sources such as incandescent and halogen lamps, Soraa’s lamps emit full visible spectrum light which renders warm, saturated colors—including important colors like reds and bright greens. Furthermore, these lamps excite Optical Brightening Agents (OBAs) in white objects like clothing, paper and plastics, making them look intentionally whiter. However, in their race to create maximally efficient, cheap products, most LED manufacturers skipped parts of the spectrum. This has resulted in blue-LED based lighting products that cannot truly render whiteness or colors.

Uniquely, Soraa’s full visible spectrum lamps with VP3 Natural White are engineered to emit all colors of the rainbow, including violet, which excites OBAs and perfectly renders whites. The research study at Penn State showed that the vast majority of participants preferred objects rendered under Soraa’s full visible spectrum light over standard LED light that lacked the short wavelength range of the spectrum. In fact, whether looking at a white dress shirt or their own smile, 90% of users preferred the whiteness rendering provided by Soraa’s lamps.

As for colors, study participants commented that colors were more saturated, vibrant and attractive under Soraa’s full visible spectrum LED lamps with VP3 Vivid Color (color rendering index (CRI) of 95 and R9 of 95) versus the blue-based LED lamps with a standard CRI of 85 and R9 of 0. The research showed that the company’s VP3 technology rendered colors with high fidelity and no change in saturation; and the colors accurately matched the reference halogen lamp. This was true not only for colored objects, but also for participants’ skin complexions.

“There are those who’ve asked: does color and whiteness rendering really matter?  Well, it does, and we now have the data to prove it,” said Mike Krames, CTO of Soraa. “Because all of our lamps render the entire visible spectrum, white fabrics and paper goods pop, plastics are brilliant and people’s smiles are whiter, and colors are more natural and beautiful.  That’s good news for consumers and retailers, who want and deserve the enormous economic and environmental benefits of LED lighting, but are unwilling to sacrifice the sales benefits of excellent light quality in return.”