Category Archives: LEDs

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.”

In a feat that may provide a promising array of applications, from energy efficiency to telecommunications to enhanced imaging, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have created a compound semiconductor of nearly perfect quality with embedded nanostructures containing ordered lines of atoms that can manipulate light energy in the mid-infrared range. More efficient solar cells, less risky and higher resolution biological imaging, and the ability to transmit massive amounts of data at higher speeds are only a few applications that this unique semiconductor will be able to support.

“This is a new and exciting field,” said Hong Lu, researcher in UCSB’s Department of Materials and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and lead author of a study that appears as a cover story of the March issue in the journal Nano Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

[Right: Artist's concept of nanometer-size metallic wires and metallic particles embedded in semiconductors, as grown by Dr. Hong Lu. Credit: Peter Allen, UCSB]

[Right: Artist’s concept of nanometer-size metallic wires and metallic particles embedded in semiconductors, as grown by Dr. Hong Lu. Credit: Peter Allen, UCSB]

Key to this technology is the use of erbium, a rare earth metal that has the ability to absorb light in the visible as well as infrared wavelength — which is longer and lower frequency wavelength to which the human eye is accustomed — and has been used for years to enhance the performance of silicon in the production of fiber optics. Pairing erbium with the element antimony (Sb), the researchers embedded the resulting compound — erbium antimonide (ErSb) —  as semimetallic nanostructures within the semiconducting matrix of gallium antimonide (GaSb).

ErSb, according to Lu, is an ideal material to match with GaSb because of its structural compatibility with its surrounding material, allowing the researchers to embed the nanostructures without interrupting the atomic lattice structure of the semiconducting matrix. The less flawed the crystal lattice structure of a semiconductor is, the more reliable and better performing the device in which it is used will be.

“The nanostructures are coherently embedded, without introducing noticeable defects, through the growth process by molecular beam epitaxy,” said Lu. “Secondly, we can control the size, the shape and the orientation of the nanostructures.” The term “epitaxy” refers to a process by which layers of material are deposited atom by atom, or molecule by molecule, one on top of the other with a specific orientation.

“It’s really a new kind of heterostructure,” said Arthur Gossard, professor in the Materials Department and also in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. While semiconductors incorporating different materials have been studied for years — a technology UCSB professor and Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer pioneered — a single crystal heterostructured semiconductor/metal is in a class of its own.

The nanostructures allow the compound semiconductor to absorb a wider spectrum of light due to a phenomenon called surface plasmon resonance, said Lu, and that the effect has potential applications in broad research fields, such as solar cells, medical applications to fight cancer, and in the new field of plasmonics.

Optics and electronics operate on vastly different scales, with electron confinement being possible in spaces far smaller than light waves. Therefore, it has been an ongoing challenge for engineers to create a circuit that can take advantage of the speed and data capacity of photons and the compactness of electronics for information processing.

The highly sought bridge between optics and electronics may be found with this compound semiconductor using surface plasmons, electron oscillations at the surface of a metal excited by light. When light (in this case, infrared) hits the surface of this semiconductor, electrons in the nanostructures begin to resonate — that is, move away from their equilibrium positions and oscillate at the same frequency as the infrared light — preserving the optical information, but shrinking it to a scale that would be compatible with electronic devices.

In the realm of imaging, embedded nanowires of ErSb offer a strong broadband polarization effect, according to Lu, filtering and defining images with infrared and even longer-wavelength terahertz light signatures. This effect can be used to image a variety of materials, including the human body, without the risk posed by the higher energies that emanate from X-rays, for instance. Chemicals such as those found in explosives and some illegal narcotics have unique absorption features in this spectrum region. The researchers have already applied for a patent for these embedded nanowires as a broadband light polarizer.

“For infrared imaging, if you can do it with controllable polarizations, there’s information there,” said Gossard.

While infrared and terahertz wavelengths offer much in the way of the kind of information they can provide, the development of instruments that can take full advantage of their range of frequencies is still an emerging field. Lu credits this breakthrough to the collaborative nature of the research on the UCSB campus, which allowed her to merge her materials expertise with the skills of researchers who specialize in infrared and terahertz technology.

“It’s amazing here,” she said. “We basically collaborated and discovered all these interesting features and properties of the material together.”

“One of the most exciting things about this for me is that this was a ‘grassroots’ collaboration,” said Mark Sherwin, professor of physics, director of the Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology at UCSB, and one of the paper’s co-authors. The idea for the direction of the research came from the junior researchers in the group, he said, grad students and undergrads from different laboratories and research groups working on different aspects of the project, all of whom decided to combine their efforts and their expertise into one study. “I think what’s really special about UCSB is that we can have an environment like that.”

Since the paper was written, most of the researchers have gone into industry: Daniel G. Ouelette and Benjamin Zaks, formerly of the Department of Physics and the Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology at UCSB, now work at Intel and Agilent, respectively. Their colleague Justin Watts, who was an undergraduate participant is now pursuing graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. Peter Burke, formerly of the UCSB Materials Department, now works at Lockheed Martin. Sascha Preu, a former postdoc in the Sherwin Group, is now assistant professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Researchers on campus are also exploring the possibilities of this technology in the field of thermoelectrics, which studies how temperature differences of a material can create electric voltage or how differences in electric voltages in a material can create temperature differences. Renowned UCSB researchers John Bowers (solid state photonics) and Christopher Palmstrom (heteroepitaxial growth of novel materials) are investigating the potential of this new semiconductor.

Nanoengineering researchers at Rice University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have unveiled a potentially scalable method for making one-atom-thick layers of molybdenum diselenide — a highly sought semiconductor that is similar to graphene but has better properties for making certain electronic devices like switchable transistors and light-emitting diodes.

 

The method for making two-dimensional molybdenum diselenide uses a technique known as chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and is described online in a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. The finding is significant because CVD is widely used by the semiconductor and materials industries to make thin films of silicon, carbon fibers and other materials.

“This new method will allow us to exploit the properties of molybdenum diselenide in a number of applications,” said study leader Pulickel Ajayan, chair of Rice’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering. “Unlike graphene, which can now easily be made in large sheets, many interesting 2-D materials remain difficult to synthesize. Now that we have a stable, efficient way to produce 2-D molybdenum diselenide, we are planning to expand this robust procedure to other 2-D materials.”

In the Rice study, Ajayan and colleagues tested their atomically thin layers of molybdenum diselenide by building a field effect transistor (FET), a commonly used device in the microelectronic industry. Tests of the FET found the electronic properties of the molybdenum diselenide layers were significantly better than those of molybdenum disulfide; the latter is a similar material that has been more extensively studied because it was easier to fabricate. For example, the FET tests found that the electron mobility of Rice’s molybdenum diselenide was higher than that of CVD-grown, molybdenum disulfide.

In solid-state physics, electron mobility refers to how quickly electrons pass through a metal or semiconductor in the presence of an electric field. Materials with high electron mobility are often preferred to reduce power consumption and heating in microelectronic devices.

“Being able to make 2-D materials in a controlled fashion really will make an impact on our understanding and use of their fascinating properties,” said study co-author Emilie Ringe, assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of chemistry at Rice. “Characterizing both the structure and function of a material, as we have done in this paper, is critical to such advances.”

Molybdenum diselenide and molybdenum disulfide each belong to a class of materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides; TMDCs are so named because they consist of two elements, a transition metal like molybdenum or tungsten and a “chalcogen” like sulfur, selenium or tellurium.

TMDCs have attracted intense interest from materials scientists because they have an atomic structure similar to graphene, the pure carbon wonder materials that attracted the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics. Graphene and similar materials are often referred to as two-dimensional because they are only one atom thick. Graphene has extraordinary electronic properties. For example, its electron mobility is tens of thousands of times greater than that of TMDCs.

However, two-dimensional TMDCs like molybdenum diselenide have attracted intense interest because their electronic properties are complementary to graphene. For example, pure graphene has no bandgap — a useful electronic property that engineers can exploit to make FETs that are easily switched on and off.

As with many nanomaterials, scientists have found that the physical properties of TMDCs change markedly when the material has nanoscale properties. For example, a slab of molybdenum diselenide that is even a micron thick has an “indirect” bandgap while a two-dimensional sheet of molybdenum diselenide has a “direct” bandgap. The difference is important for electronics because direct-bandgap materials can be used to make switchable transistors and sensitive photodetectors.

“One of the driving forces in Rice’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering is the close collaborations that develop between the people who are focused on synthesis and those of us involved with characterization,” said Ringe, who joined Rice’s faculty in January. “We hope this will be the beginning of a series of new protocols to reliably synthesize a variety of 2-D materials.”

The research was supported by the Army Research Office, the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s FAME Center, the Office of Naval Research and Singapore’s MOE Academic Research Fund.

Additional study co-authors include Xingli Wang, Yongji Gong, Gang Shi, Kunttal Keyshar, Gonglan Ye, Robert Vajtai and Jun Lou, all of Rice, and Wai Leong Chow, Zheng Liu and Beng Kang Tay, all of Nanyang Technological University.

After the successful premier of a program to connect early-stage companies with strategic investors and venture capitalists (VCs) in the U.S., SEMI is expanding the program to Europe as part of SEMICON Europa 2014 in Grenoble, France (October 7-9). The new expanded program, called Innovation Village, will extend the original scope of SEMICON West’s Silicon Innovation Forum (SIF) with a conference and three-day start-up and innovation partner exhibition, held in a dedicated area at SEMICON Europa (www.semiconeuropa.org).

Located at the heart of SEMICON Europa, Innovation Village will bring together up to 50 of the most innovative European start-ups with top investors from the semiconductor industry. The goal of Innovation Village is to encourage exchanges between early-stage technology companies and investors interested in identifying investment opportunities. Participating start-ups will have the opportunity to exhibit for three days at individual kiosks in the Innovation Village exhibition hall and actively participate in the SIF, presenting their innovations in a series of short pitches and, for selected companies, performing a product demonstration. The Innovation Village exhibition hall will also host several key companies and investors in exclusive VIP booths fully equipped with private meeting space.

“Grenoble has gained a reputation for being one of Europe’s leading cities in innovative research and has successfully hosted a high number of start-ups,” says Heinz Kundert, president of SEMI Europe. “With SEMICON Europa coming to Grenoble for the first time, it is an excellent occasion to demonstrate the region’s capabilities in innovation and commercialization of new technologies.”

Innovation Village will represent the most viable new technology in Europe. Interested start-ups are invited to fill out a Request for Participation (RFP) form online at the SEMICON Europa website (www.semiconeuropa.org/Segments/InnovationVillage). Start-ups are encouraged to apply as early as possible. RFPs will be judged by the SEMICON Europa SIF Committee, experts in venture capitalism and new technology investment: Lisa Müller, 3M New Ventures; Jean-Marc Girard, Air Liquide Electronics; Eileen Tanghal, Applied Ventures; Claus Schmidt, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH; Jong Sang Choi, Samsung Venture; Loic Lietar, STMicroelectronics; and Jim Traynor, TEL Venture Capital.

To encourage visibility for both investors and start-ups, Innovation Village conferences and the exhibition will be free-of-charge for all SEMICON Europa visitors. Speakers will attract diverse visitors, including large companies, SMEs, and start-ups to the Innovation Village area. Dedicated innovation lounge areas set amidst the exhibition kiosks will allow visitors, investors and start-ups to interact with each other. For more information on Innovation Village and the Silicon Innovation Forum Europe (www.semiconeuropa.org) contact Anne-Marie Dutron, SEMI Europe-Grenoble, at [email protected]

Nanostructures half the breadth of a DNA strand could improve the efficiency of light emitting diodes (LEDs), especially in the “green gap,” a portion of the spectrum where LED efficiency plunges, simulations at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have shown.

This simulation of a 1-nm-wide indium nitride wire shows the distribution of an electron around a positively charged 'hole.' Strong quantum confinement in these small nanostructures enables efficient light emission at visible wavelengths. Credit: Visualization: Burlen Loring, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

This simulation of a 1-nm-wide indium nitride wire shows the distribution of an electron around a positively charged ‘hole.’ Strong quantum confinement in these small nanostructures enables efficient light emission at visible wavelengths.
Credit: Visualization: Burlen Loring, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Using NERSC’s Cray XC30 supercomputer “Edison,” University of Michigan researchers Dylan Bayerl and Emmanouil Kioupakis found that the semiconductor indium nitride (InN), which typically emits infrared light, will emit green light if reduced to 1 nanometer-wide wires. Moreover, just by varying their sizes, these nanostructures could be tailored to emit different colors of light, which could lead to more natural-looking white lighting while avoiding some of the efficiency loss today’s LEDs experience at high power.

“Our work suggests that indium nitride at the few-nanometer size range offers a promising approach to engineering efficient, visible light emission at tailored wavelengths,” said Kioupakis.

At low power, nitride-based LEDs (most commonly used in white lighting) are very efficient, converting most of their energy into light. But turn the power up to levels that could light up a room and efficiency plummets, meaning a smaller fraction of electricity gets converted to light. This effect is especially pronounced in green LEDs, giving rise to the term “green gap.”

Nanomaterials offer the tantalizing prospect of LEDs that can be “grown” in arrays of nanowires, dots or crystals. The resulting LEDs could not only be thin, flexible and high-resolution, but very efficient, as well.

“If you reduce the dimensions of a material to be about as wide as the atoms that make it up, then you get quantum confinement. The electrons are squeezed into a small region of space, increasing the bandgap energy,” Kioupakis said. That means the photons emitted when electrons and holes combine are more energetic, producing shorter wavelengths of light.

The energy difference between an LED’s electrons and holes, called the bandgap, determines the wavelength of the emitted light. The wider the bandgap, the shorter the wavelength of light. The bandgap for bulk InN is quite narrow, only 0.6 electron volts (eV), so it produces infrared light. In Bayerl and Kioupakis’ simulated InN nanostructures, the calculated bandgap increased, leading to the prediction that green light would be produced with an energy of 2.3eV.

“If we can get green light by squeezing the electrons in this wire down to a nanometer, then we can get other colors by tailoring the width of the wire,” said Kioupakis. A wider wire should yield yellow, orange or red. A narrower wire, indigo or violet.

That bodes well for creating more natural-looking light from LEDs. By mixing red, green and blue LEDs engineers can fine tune white light to warmer, more pleasing hues. This “direct” method isn’t practical today because green LEDs are not as efficient as their blue and red counterparts. Instead, most white lighting today comes from blue LED light passed through a phosphor, a solution similar to fluorescent lighting and not a lot more efficient. Direct LED lights would not only be more efficient, but the color of light they produce could be dynamically tuned to suit the time of day or the task at hand.

Using pure InN, rather than layers of alloy nitride materials, would eliminate one factor that contributes to the inefficiency of green LEDs: nanoscale composition fluctuations in the alloys. These have been shown to significantly impact LED efficiency.

Also, using nanowires to make LEDs eliminates the “lattice mismatch” problem of layered devices. “When the two materials don’t have the same spacing between their atoms and you grow one over the other, it strains the structure, which moves the holes and electrons further apart, making them less likely to recombine and emit light,” said Kioupakis, who discovered this effect in previous research that also drew on NERSC resources. “In a nanowire made of a single material, you don’t have this mismatch and so you can get better efficiency,” he explained.

The researchers also suspect the nanowire’s strong quantum confinement contributes to efficiency by squeezing the holes and electrons closer together, a subject for future research. “Bringing the electrons and holes closer together in the nanostructure increases their mutual attraction and increases the probability that they will recombine and emit light.” Kioupakis said.

While this result points the way towards a promising avenue of exploration, the researchers emphasize that such small nanowires are difficult to synthesize. However, they suspect their findings can be generalized to other types of nanostructures, such as embedded InN nanocrystals, which have already been successfully synthesized in the few-nanometers range.

NERSC’s newest flagship supercomputer (named “Edison” in honor of American inventor Thomas Edison) was instrumental in their research, said Bayerl. The system’s thousands of compute cores and high memory-per-node allowed Bayerl to perform massively parallel calculations with many terabytes of data stored in RAM, which made the InN nanowire simulation feasible. “We also benefited greatly from the expert support of NERSC staff,” said Bayerl. Burlen Loring of NERSC’s Analytics Group created visualizations for the study, including the journal’s cover image. The researchers also used the open-source BerkeleyGW code, developed by NERSC’s Jack Deslippe.

2013: A year in review


April 4, 2014

By Lara Chamness, senior market analyst manager, SEMI

Semiconductor Market Trends

2013 was a record year in terms of semiconductor device revenues; the industry finally exceeded the long elusive $300 billion mark, registering almost 5 percent growth according to the SIA. While 2013 was a growth year for the chip industry, it was the second consecutive year of declining revenues for both semiconductor equipment and materials; the 2013 semiconductor equipment and materials markets contracted 14 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

Materials-chart-1

Source: SIA, SEMI, SEMI/SEAJ

When looking at revenue trends, it is important to consider the impact of the weakened Yen on total revenues. The Table shows the impact of the weakened Yen on Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan’s (SEAJ) book-to-bill data. If the data were kept in Yen, the 2013 market for Japan-based suppliers would be down 14 percent. However, when the Yen are converted to dollars the 2013 equipment market for Japan-based suppliers declined almost 30 percent. Since Japan-headquartered suppliers represent a significant portion of the equipment market, this has the effect of dragging down the global equipment market. Given the importance of Japanese suppliers to the materials market, the weakened Yen also contributed significantly to the decline of semiconductor materials revenues in 2013. For a more detailed discussion of the impact on the semiconductor equipment and materials market please refer to Dan Tracy’s article in the March SEMI Global Update.

Weakening Yen Impact on Japan Supplier Annual Billings

Materials-chart2

Semiconductor Equipment

Worldwide sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment totaled $31.6 billion in 2013, representing a year-over-year decrease of 14 percent and spending on par with 2005 levels. Looking at equipment sales by major equipment category, 2013 saw contractions in all major categories, Wafer Processing equipment contracted 11 percent, while Assembly and Packaging and Test equipment contracted 26 and 24 percent, respectively. The Other Front-end segment (Other Front End includes Wafer Manufacturing, Mask/Reticle, and Fab Facilities equipment) contracted 34 percent.

TSMC continued with its aggressive investments in 2013, resulting in the Taiwan market increasing 11 percent to maintain the top spot ($10.6 billion) in equipment spending. The only other region to experience year-over-year growth was China spurred by investments by SK Hynix, Samsung, and SMIC, with an increase of 30 percent. North America surpassed South Korea to claim the second spot, device makers reduced their spending in Korea last year. Japan remained in the fourth top spot, just above China, with $3.4 billion in equipment sales. Equipment sales to Europe decreased 25 percent in 2013. Investments in the Rest of World region remained relatively flat when compared to 2012.  Rest of World region aggregates Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, other areas of Southeast Asia and smaller global markets.

Materials-chart3

Semiconductor Materials

The global semiconductor materials market, which includes both fab and packaging materials, contracted 3 percent in 2013 totaling $43.5 billion. Even with the decrease, the semiconductor materials market has been larger than the equipment for the past six years.

Taiwan maintained the top spot for the fourth year in a row, followed by Japan, South Korea, Rest of World, and China. Driving the materials market in Taiwan are advanced packaging operations and foundries. While Japan still claims the largest installed fab capacity globally and has a tradition in domestic-based packaging, many companies in Japan have rapidly adopted a fab lite strategy and have consolidated their fab and packaging plants. South Korea passed Rest of World (primarily SE Asia) as the third largest market for semiconductor materials given the dramatic increase in advanced fab capacity in the region in recent years. Looking at the materials market by wafer fab and packaging materials, both segments contracted 3 percent.

Materials-chart4

Outlook

Most analysts predict mid- to high single-digit growth for the semiconductor device market for the year. Initial monthly data for silicon shipments and semiconductor equipment are proving to be encouraging. Given growth expectations for the device market, it is projected that the semiconductor materials market will increase 2 percent this year. Given two consecutive years of double-digit decline, the outlook for semiconductor equipment is much more optimistic with current expectations positive with spending potentially growing 20 percent or more

2013 was another disappointing year for equipment and materials suppliers as device manufacturers finally exceed revenues of $300 billion. Anemic sales, downward price pressure, combined with a weakened Yen proved to be a significant challenge on the semiconductor supply chain. 2014 is promising to be better for the entire market with device, materials and equipment markets are all anticipated to increase for the year.

By Karen Savala, president, SEMI Americas

Companies in the microelectronics manufacturing supply loop see “sustainability” as an important objective in their operations as well as their business strategy.   This trend has progressed far beyond the niche players that traditionally positioned themselves as “green,” and, in our industry, now includes virtually every significant IC manufacturer as well as a broad base of their suppliers. While sometimes seen as a social, legal and regulatory obligation, sustainability is increasingly considered a differentiating factor in global competitiveness relative to the technologies and products being provided.

Sustainable manufacturing is the creation of manufactured products through economically-sound processes that minimize negative environmental impacts while conserving energy and natural resources. Sustainable manufacturing also enhances employee, community, and product safety.  A large and growing number of manufacturers are realizing substantial financial and environmental benefits from sustainable business practices and are driving requirements through the supply chain.

One example cited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pertains to two of Freescale Semiconductor’s major energy-using systems that were assessed for energy efficiency. Following the assessment, the company implemented projects which included adjustments to water pumping and compressed air systems. As a result, the company’s Oak Hill Fabrication plant in Austin, Texas reduced its annual energy consumption by 28 million kWh of electricity and 26,000 million Btu of natural gas over a three year period, with more than $2 million in annual savings.

Now, key industry trends that influence facilities purchasing decisions pertain to issues such as energy efficiency, pollution control, water conservation, environmental impact, climate protection, conflict minerals in supply chains, as well as the ongoing attention to safety and ergonomics.

Intel Corporation says that technological advancement and environmental sustainability should go hand in hand.   The company incorporates environmental performance goals throughout their operations, seeking continuous improvement in energy efficiency, emissions reduction, resource conservation, and other areas. As delineated on the company’s web site, Intel strives to minimize the environmental impact of its products—from design through disposal—and seeks innovative ways that technology can help address long-term sustainability challenges.  According to their environmental reporting, TSMC requires equipment vendors to consider water, power, and material conservation when designing new generations of equipment, and also requires a long-term blueprint for carbon reduction and future environmental strategy. TSMC also verifies that the energy performance of each tool meets or exceeds conditions set in the procurement contract after tool installation is completed. GLOBALFOUNDRIES also states that environmental sustainability is at the core of high-volume silicon manufacturing.

Recently, SEMI presented its Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) leadership award to Dr. Tzu-Yin (TY) Chiu, CEO of SMIC for minimizing its environmental impact by using resources efficiently, reducing pollution substantially, disposing of hazardous materials responsibly, and upgrading facilities regularly (article: www.semi.org/en/node/49356).

Accordingly, SEMI members see an increasing amount and complexity of EHS performance and reporting requirements from both customers and regulators.  Throughout the electronics supply chain there is increased scrutiny of environmental performance and SEMI has long maintained an EHS program that encompasses the industry’s broadest network of EHS and purchasing professionals dedicated to collaborating on regulatory, manufacturing and fab facilities issues related to environmental impact.

Now we are extending the spotlight on this important area.  In conjunction with SEMICON West and INTERSOLAR North America, SEMI is organizing a four-day Sustainable Manufacturing Forum to share information about the latest technologies, products, and management approaches that promote sustainable manufacturing. The Forum will feature twenty hours of seminars / workshops / roundtable discussions in twelve distinct Sessions as well as many structured opportunities for professional networking.

A special exhibit pavilion will be associated with the Sustainable Manufacturing Forum to showcase companies and new technologies from around the world that address sustainable manufacturing needs for micro-electronics, nano-electronics, photovoltaics, solid state lighting, electronic displays, and other high-tech products. The SEMICON West Sustainable Manufacturing Pavilion will provide direct opportunities for companies to market their value to a wide variety of customers and their supply chains involved in high tech manufacturing.

Further complementing the focus on products that improve sustainable manufacturing, the Sustainable Technologies Award will recognize SEMICON West exhibitors who provide equipment, materials, or services that contribute to the sustainable improvement of the environment.

Together, the Sustainable Forum, Pavilion and Award will support the industry’s imperative for greater environmental, energy, and facilities performance.

I sincerely hope that you will participate and join the new focus on sustainable manufacturing at SEMICON West.

CEA-Leti will demonstrate its new prototype for wireless high data rate Li-Fi (light fidelity) transmission at Light + Building 2014 in Frankfurt, Germany, March 30-April 4. The technology employs the high-frequency modulation capabilities of light-emitting diode (LED) engines used in commercial lighting. It achieves throughputs of up to 10Mb/s at a range of three meters, suitable for HD video streaming or Internet browsing, using light power of less than 1,000 lumens and with direct or even indirect lighting.

With this first proof of concept and its expertise in RF communications, Leti forecasts data transmission rates in excess of 100Mb/s with traditional lighting based on LED lamps using this technology approach and without altering the high-performance lighting characteristics.

Visible light communications (VLC), or Li-Fi, have gained significant momentum in recent years, primarily because of expectations that LEDs will become predominant in the lighting market. Indeed, as part of its Ecodesign process, the European Union established a schedule for LED lighting penetration (regulation No. 1194/2012). Halogen lamps will be phased out and replaced by LED lighting by Sept. 1, 2016, in 30 European countries.

Moreover, because LEDs can be modulated at very high frequencies and their oscillations are invisible to humans, they permit information transmission at very high data rates.

Other technical and market factors also are increasing interest in data transmission through lighting. These include crowding of the conventional radio frequency (RF) spectrum, the mobile data-traffic explosion in cellular networks, and the need for wireless data transmission without electromagnetic field (EMF) interference.

The demonstration is part of a Leti project begun in 2013 to achieve a high data rate Li-Fi prototype by applying Leti’s expertise in digital communications, hardware prototyping and solid-state lighting.

The optical system consists of an A19 lamp based on LEDs at the transmitter and an avalanche photodiode at the receiver. The digital communication component is implemented on a proprietary and reconfigurable platform that carries out a flexible multi-carrier modulation.

Leti, which is demonstrating the Li-Fi capability to show a promising alternative to conventional RF wireless communications, is also focusing on component optimization to offer a bidirectional link.

The prototype was demonstrated at Forum LED Europe in Paris in 2013 and at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today introduced a new lineup of flip chip LED packages and modules offering enhanced design flexibility and a high degree of reliability. The new offerings, for use in leading-edge LED lighting such as LED bulbs, MR/PAR and downlights, will be available in the market during the second quarter of this year.

flip chip

“By utilizing an advanced flip chip technology, Samsung has made significant improvements to its LED packages and modules,” said Bangwon Oh, senior vice president, LED strategic marketing team, Samsung Electronics.

Samsung’s new flip chip (FC) LED package and flip chip on module (FCOM) solutions feature highly efficient and versatile LED structures, created by flipping over blue LED chips and adhering phosphor film to each of them. Unlike conventional LED packages that dispense phosphor and then place a plastic mold over each chip, Samsung’s FC package technology can produce LED packages down to a chip-scale size without any mold, enabling more compact lighting fixture designs.

Samsung’s new FC and FCOM series can be driven at a current higher than that of conventional LED components, and have low thermal resistance. The low thermal resistance improves the reliability of the FC and FCOM solutions, resulting in higher flux, and a decrease in the number of packages needed, plus a reduction in the size of the circuit board.

Also, by attaching a cell film, each package gains uniform thickness and lower color deviation. As a result, the FC and FCOM solutions provide a high level of color consistency and ensure the chromaticity control of MacAdam 3-step ellipses.

The new FC and FCOM LED solutions include a middle power LED package (LM131A), a high power LED package (LH141A) and an LED downlight module, all featuring the new Samsung flip chip technology.

Flip chip middle power LED package (LM131A) and high power LED package (LH141A)

Samsung’s LM131A and LH141A flip chip packages feature exceptionally compact form factors of 1.22×1.22 millimeters and 1.4×1.4mm, respectively. By excluding a plastic mold, the two packages can function at a high current level in a highly reliable manner, even after long hour of use. These advantages make them ideal for use in LED lighting applications requiring a small form factor with high light output, including LED bulbs and spotlight products such as MRs and PARs.

In addition, the use of a phosphor film assures color quality that satisfies the MacAdam 3-step.

Flip chip on module (FCOM) for LED downlight fixtures

Samsung’s new FCOM downlight products are distinguished by their high light output. Compared to a chip-on-board (COB) engine, which has a fixed wattage, the new FCOM permits simple adjustments in the number of FC LED packages to make the module compatible with a variety of electrical drivers of different wattages, in allowing greater design flexibility.

To create a downlight with 1000lm output and 100lm/W efficacy, Samsung FCOMs require a 1.7×1.7 centimeter circuit. Such a small form factor makes these FCOMs well-suited for size-sensitive LED lighting applications, which include LED bulbs, MR/PAR spotlights, downlights and even cove lighting.

Samsung’s FCOMs satisfy the MacAdam 3-step and can support MacAdam 2-step depending on customer needs, thanks to the superb color consistency of the chips and a rating of at least 80 on the color rendering index (CRI). The new Samsung FCOMs also offer a range of correlated color temperature (CCT) – from 2700K to 5000K.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new processing technique that makes light emitting diodes (LEDs) brighter and more resilient by coating the semiconductor material gallium nitride (GaN) with a layer of phosphorus-derived acid.

“By coating polar GaN with a self-assembling layer of phosphonic groups, we were able to increase luminescence without increasing energy input,” says Stewart Wilkins, a Ph.D. student at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work. “The phosphonic groups also improve stability, making the GaN less likely to degrade in solution.

“Making the GaN more stable is important,” Wilkins adds, “because that makes it more viable for use in biomedical applications, such as implantable sensors.”

The researchers started with polar GaN, composed of alternating layers of gallium and nitrogen. To increase luminescence, they etched the surface of the material with phosphoric acid. At the same time, they added phosphonic groups – organic molecules containing phosphorus – that self-assembled into a monolayer on the surface of the material. This layer further increased luminescence and improved the stability of the GaN by making it less likely to react chemically with its environment.

The paper, “In Situ Chemical Functionalization of Gallium Nitride with Phosphonic Acid Derivatives during Etching,” is published online in the journal Langmuir. Senior author of the paper is Dr. Albena Ivanisevic, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and associate professor of the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Consuelo Arellano, a research associate professor of statistics at NC State; Dr. Tania Paskova, a research professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State; and Michelle Greenough, an undergraduate at Wagner College.

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation