Category Archives: LEDs

By Richard Acello
Small Times Correspondent

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 10, 2001 — Mike Sailor recalls his first teaching seminar. “I drew a diagram of the heart with the chambers for my sixth grade class,” he remembers. Sailor wasn’t the teacher, but one of the students. “The teacher couldn’t believe it.”

Since then, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) chemistry professor has emerged as one of the pioneers in the use of nanostructured silicon, shepherding research in a wide range of applications from bioterror detection to next-generation stents for heart patients.

In a way, he’s come full circle since his first lecture on the heart. “It is ironic,” he says.

Research projects in the Sailor Group involve the use of nanocrystalline porous silicon, which is used to coat a chip. When the silicon is exposed to a catalyst, Sailor and his colleagues measure the optical and electrical reactions.

“Mike was one of the people who started the field of working with nanostructured silicon a decade ago,” said William Trogler, a colleague and chemistry professor at UCSD. “Mike’s always trying new ideas left and right.”

His work in developing a network of low-power, battery operated sensors to detect poison gases such as sarin and other bioterror projects funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) was started before Sept. 11, but has moved into the national spotlight since the terrorist attacks.

With Trogler, Sailor has developed a nanowire composed of silicon polymer that has been tested to detect the presence of TNT down to about one part in a billion in air and about 50 parts per billion in seawater. The polymer could be used as a “sniffer” that would sample the air around a package, for example, or could be dissolved in solvents and painted on surfaces.

But Sailor is most excited about his team’s efforts in using nanophase materials to join the inorganic or “dead” world with biological or living systems.

In an article in the Nov. 30 issue of Cell magazine, Sailor and colleagues Michael Colicos, Boyce Collins, and Yukiko Goda grow nerve cells on silicon wafers and hit them with a beam of light to study how they build connections and form memories.

“Nanomaterials can make a big impact in the life sciences. Take heart transplants,” Sailor says. “To date, they’ve been done with big mechanical machines, but nanotechnology allows you to do things you couldn’t in the past, to make things really small so they can ‘talk’ to capillaries, forming an active matrix that can tell you whether drug interactions, for example, are good or bad.”

Citing early stage research being performed at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, Sailor says stents like the type inserted into the heart of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney could be “made smart” to “encapsulate something in the stent so that it senses whether the body is beginning to reject it.”

Sailor is also looking at nanotechnology to regulate drug dosage and to perform tests. “We have to make vessels that hold just a few molecules, so we don’t overdose the patient,” he says. “In testing blood, say there are a thousand assays you want to perform, so you’d either have to take a lot of blood or make it so you just take a small amount question of material. Nanotechnology lets you use smaller and smaller sample amounts so it’s less intrusive.” Or as Sailor delicately put it, “to do a lot of tests without having to burn through a million rats.”

In another Sailor project, nanostructured wells are used to keep liver cells alive. The idea is to “mimic the function of a liver to see if a drug will be toxic. “You can put a lot of functions in a very small space, you can have a lot more information coming out of a single cell,” he explains.

He’s also collaborating with the La Jolla, Calif.-based Burnham Institute on targeted nanomachines that pass into the bloodstream and send reports back from cancer cells. This is key because cancer is more easily cured if caught in early stages. “This research is embryonic — a couple of experiments — but we want to know can we build a machine that works like an antibody or receptor.”

Though science is often thought of as an isolated pursuit, part of Sailor’s success has been his ability to network and attract colleagues, including high school students, to his projects.

“What’s neat about UCSD is that it’s an interdisciplinary community,” he says. “So three years ago I made it a point to go around and ask (biology) people what their problems were.”

“He’s very good at working with undergrads,” says Trogler, “and has more undergrads working for him than most other professors.”

With a dozen or more projects bubbling on various burners, Sailor says he clears his mind by walking or bike riding near the UCSD campus in picturesque La Jolla.

“I want to do something that’s never been done before because that’s the business we’re in — building something that can’t be built by hand,” he says. “It comes down to chemistry, because the human body is built on chemical reactions — how do you build a nose? I want to develop tool sets that nature has not built, but if nature knew it could be built, would want to do it.”

Sailor says he believes the technology will be advanced by the use of optics, using beams of light to induce reactions rather than chemicals. He cites the work quantum dot pioneer Paul Alivisatos of the University of California, Berkeley, and Moungi Bawendi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as having fired “shots across the bow.”

With the intersection between biology and inorganic materials, the new century may belong to the nanobiologist,” Sailor says, working with “stuff too small for a surgeon’s fingers.”

Sailor’s mix of friends includes folks in the cognitive sciences and literature. So what does he tell lay people about this work? “I tell them I’m an inorganic material chemist — you know the Pentium computer? We use the same materials to do other things.”

In any event, Sailor says he’s not the least bit fazed by working in the fast moving field of nanotechnology. He quotes Alivisatos as saying, “This stuff is so far out that no one will understand it and by the time they do, it will be over.”

More on Sailor’s Research
Tiny chips could serve as scouts in war and peace
Some anti-terror tools of the future

Dec. 6, 2001 – Seoul, South Korea – Hynix Semiconductor Inc. said it wants US chipmaker Micron Technology Inc. to inject cash into the company under a proposed alliance aimed at easing the global glut of computer memory chips.

Hynix, the world’s second largest memory chipmaker, said it would rather sell new shares to third-ranked Micron than accept an equity swap, according to Reuters.

A Hynix official declined to confirm a report in the Korea Economic Daily saying Hynix had in principle agreed to exchange a 15 to 20% stake held by its creditors for a certain amount of stock in Micron. A final deal was expected in the first half of next year, the report said.

The two companies began talks on this week, helping to boost chip shares around the world amid hopes that the discussions may spur restructuring in an industry blighted by overcapacity.

“In talks with Micron, we naturally want a cash injection from them,” a senior Hynix official told Reuters. “We need fresh money.”

The troubled Korean chipmaker owes 8.64 trillion won ($6.83 billion) to banks and other financial institutions.

“All possibilities are open and talks are in the early stages,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

Micron and Hynix announced plans earlier this week to discuss a strategic alliance or other options, including a merger, which would forge the world’s top producer, replacing Samsung Electronics.

Any deal that cuts capacity should lift depressed chip prices, which have already begun to recover following news of the talks. Hynix and Samsung said they had increased contract chip prices by as much as 20% for big clients in December.

A Hynix official said Micron representatives would visit Hynix’s main plant in Ichon later this week to begin due diligence on the Korean company.

Analysts said a deal was unlikely to take shape any time soon as it needed agreement from several parties with conflicting views.

“Hynix’s creditors, who are heavily exposed to the company, also want to get out of it,” said a chip analyst at a local brokerage. “From Micron’s point of view, it has no reason to do good to its rivals at its cost.”

“I think both parties have very, very different ideas about negotiating,” Gartner Dataquest analyst Andrew Norwood said.

“Hynix thinks Micron is coming in as a white knight and is going to give it an injection of capital and let it continue with its DRAM business. Micron thinks they’re going in for the kill and they’re going to take out a competitor,” he said.

“I think when they sit down, they’ll very quickly realize they’re talking about very different things and that’s going to be a real problem.”

Hynix creditors, led by Korea Exchange Bank, extended a $7 billion bailout in late October in return for control over the Korean chipmaker.

By Jo McIntyre
Small Times Correspondent

Dec. 3, 2001 — NanoOpto Corp., a new company formed to mass-manufacture optical communication subcomponents on a wafer, announced today it has received $16 million from four venture capital firms.

Bessemer Venture Partners and Morgenthaler led the first round funding, and were joined by New Enterprise Associates, and U.S. Trust’s Excelsior Venture Partners III LLC. Rob Soni and Glenn Falcao from Bessemer will assume board seats along with two Morgenthaler Ventures general partners, Greg Blonder and Gary Shaffer.

With this funding and a recently completed management team, another nanotech process is about to jump out of the lab and into the private sector.

“People have been working on this for 20 or 30 years, but no one has been able to figure out how to mass manufacture subcomponents on a wafer,” Barry Weinbaum, NanoOpto’s president and chief executive told Small Times. Weinbaum was formerly with Lucent Technologies/AT&T, where he was a vice president in the Optical Networking Group.

He said the company has two core competencies: subwavelength optical elements, or components for optical networking systems; and nanomanufacturing technology that can produce nano-optical components on a chip. The components can be used in products like video displays, miniature electronics, or devices for sorting DNA molecules.

“We are an outgrowth of the 20 years of research our principal founder, Stephen Chou, did,” he said. “Instead of the very labor-intensive manual assembly processes that exist, we have an automated process” in which plastic forms itself into arrays of pillars under certain carefully controlled conditions.

“They had a technology that was fundamental and low cost and had never been applied to optics before,” said Blonder, of Morgenthaler Ventures, explaining his company’s interest in the firm. “We have probably two dozen optics investments both at the systems and the components level, so we are relatively knowledgeable,” about the industry.

On the $16 million number, Blonder said that the investment is average for this type of industry, “given that they have to set up a clean room for manufacturing.”

Developed by Chou and his students, the technology is still poorly understood from a scientific point of view, but tests and experiments have shown that thin, flat polymer film can self-form perfectly ordered micropillar arrays.

The process, called LISA for Lithographically Induced Self Assembly, makes pillars with dimensions of a little more than half a micron (a micron is a millionth of a meter). The technique involves stamping a template into soft plastic to create structures with dimensions as small as six nanometers.

It’s tedious to create the template, but after that, making the subcomponents is easy.

The company operated in “superstealth mode” until today’s announcement, but will ramp up quickly, hiring engineering, manufacturing, operations and marketing staff, and building a manufacturing lab in New Jersey.

“We have talked to lots of customers, and have made sample products that potential customers are analyzing,” Weinbaum said, “but we are not announcing our first suite of products until about March. We will be ready to ship in volume in June and will receive meaningful revenue then.”

NanoOpto, based in Somerset, N.J., was founded in mid-2000 by the company’s chairman, Stephen Chou, director of Princeton University’s Nanostructures Laboratory, and its acting chief operating officer, Howard Lee, formerly a senior vice president at Apple’s Macintosh Division, who also was a founder of Sun Microsystems, where he served as vice president of engineering.

Others on the management team include: Hubert Kostal named today as vice president of marketing and sales, Sheo Khetan, vice president of operations, Y. K. Park, senior director of engineering, and Hope Conoscente, director of human resources.

Nov. 16, 2001 – Shanghai, China – Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) has successfully secured more than $1 billion of capital through the sale of Series A Preferred Shares earlier this fall.

The investor group includes Shanghai Industrial Holdings Ltd., Goldman Sachs, H&Q Asia Pacific Limited, Walden International, and a Singapore consortium led by Vertex Management. With this global network of strategic and financial investors, this first round brings SMIC a total commitment of more than $1 billion. No one shareholder currently has a controlling stake in the company.

“There is no dominant shareholder in this company,” said SMIC spokesperson Sarina Huang. “Only those investors who have put in more than US$50 million will be on the board of directors.”

Each of the nine major investors owns stakes ranging from 10 to 17%, according to the Financial Times.

In addition, the company is currently securing a $480 million loan from domestic banks. The total capital financing raised will be used by SMIC to fund its construction of three advanced wafer fabs in the Zhang Jiang Hi-Tech Park, located in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai, China.

Pilot production has already begun in Fab 1 and volume output is expected by the beginning of 2002. Fab 2 is expected to begin equipment installation by August 2002 and to commence pilot production by the end of 2002.

SMIC is operating at 0.25-micron and below processing technology in the production of various ICs to be used in commercial products ranging from mobile phones to laptop computers, the company said.

November 16, 2001 – Midland, MI – International SEMATECH will supply process wafers to the SiLKnet Alliance, an industrywide collaboration of materials and equipment suppliers working toward integrated low-k process development.

SiLKnet members will use the wafers to develop compatible processes and products to support SiLK semiconductor dielectric resins, a low-k material for the 130nm technology node and beyond.

“Our wafer supply agreement with International SEMATECH kicks off formal development efforts under the SiLKnet Alliance, but more importantly it underscores the real value of this collaboration. With these wafers, Alliance member companies are able to work simultaneously on developing products and streamlining processes for SiLK resins, thereby speeding availability of off-the-shelf SiLK process module solutions for our customers,” said Greg Bauer, SiLKnet Alliance development director.

“We’re especially pleased to have SEMATECH as our wafer supplier. SEMATECH is a highly regarded technology partner whose mission is to promote the interests common to all chipmakers. It has extensive experience collaborating with equipment and materials suppliers, as well as with government and academic research centers, to refine the tools and technology necessary to produce future generations of chips,” Bauer continued.

SEMATECH’s advanced technology development facility (ATDF), which recently began to offer low-k processing using SiLK dielectric materials, will produce partially patterned wafers for the Alliance in support of SiLKnet’s etch, CMP, cleaning, metrology, and other process module focus areas.

The ATDF will produce wafers using dense SiLK structures; initial wafers will use 250nm designs, with a future migration toward smaller geometries. As the Alliance develops processes to support the extensibility of SiLK materials, future ATDF activities will include production of partially patterned wafers using porous SiLK resins.

Michael Simmonds, SiLKnet applications development manager, noted that SiLKnet members will make information about SiLK-compatible process and product developments available to their customers. “Dow [Chemical Company] will manage distribution of all wafers to Alliance member companies. This facilitation will be essential as the Alliance achieves its development goals, and represents Dow’s commitment to assuring that customers have compatible SiLK processes for their most complex device structures,” Simmonds said.

“As the industry moves toward the 100nm technology node, advanced low-k dielectric materials will become ubiquitous in the development of next-generation devices. As a result, chipmakers must have production-ready low-k processes that are easy to integrate and cost efficient,” said Brent Ames, Wafer Services manager at International SEMATECH. “International SEMATECH has built working electrical test structures with Dow SiLK resins in the past, and is now beginning to evaluate the porous SiLK material with two-level copper dual damascene structures. For SiLKnet, our goal is to supply the Alliance with exceptional quality SiLK-coated wafers.”

Established earlier this year to enable industrywide SiLK resin integration expertise, SiLKnet is a diverse, non-exclusive alliance open to all semiconductor materials and equipment suppliers. Founding Alliance members include Arch Chemicals Inc., Ashland Specialty Chemical Company, Dainippon Screen Mfg. Co. Ltd., The Dow Chemical Company, EKC Technology Inc., Ferro Corp., Planar Solutions LLC, Supercritical Systems Inc., Tokyo Electron Limited and Verteq Inc.

November 1, 2001 – Round Rock, TX – DuPont Photomasks Inc. founder Kenneth Rygler is resigning to pursue personal and other interests. Rygler, exec. VP of worldwide marketing and strategic planning at DuPont, will serve as a consultant to the company.

“Fifteen years ago, Ken founded DuPont Photomasks by creating a vision of a consolidated, technology-driven, global photomask industry. His vision was right on target as the role of the photomask has transformed over time into a critical, enabling technology for the semiconductor industry,” said Peter Kirlin, chairman and CEO of DuPont Photomasks.

“Ken has played a significant role in virtually every strategic move the company has made,” continued Kirlin. “For example, he led our entry into Taiwan and Singapore, which has provided a solid foundation for our strong competitive position in Asia. In addition, Ken has been a strong advocate for the photomask industry in general, articulating the need for increased collaboration across the supply chain. We are fortunate that Ken will continue serving DuPont Photomasks in a strategic consulting role, allowing us to benefit from his wisdom and experience, as we develop and execute on strategies designed to capitalize on the many opportunities before us.”

Thomas Blake, currently director of IR and corporate communications for DuPont Photomasks, has been named VP of marketing. Blake joined DuPont Photomasks in 1996, where he held marketing and strategic management positions, reporting to Rygler, prior to being named director of IR and corporate communications in 1999.

Meg Villeneuve

Wilmington, MA—BOC Edwards has developed an ammonia gas production system that removes impurities for use in the manufacturing of light emitting diodes (LEDs).

High purity ammonia gas has applications in the semiconductor, LED, and flat panel display markets where low levels of metallic impurities and moisture are required for processing. “By removing the impurities, LED manufacturers will be able to improve the photo luminescence of LED, or make it brighter,” says Rob Limouze of BOC.

The system uses a vapor phase transfer operation to remove metallic impurities and oil, which are common contaminants in raw anhydrous ammonia streams. Moisture is removed utilizing a chemical/mechanical dryer unit, according to BOC.

The system is external to the fab and can annually produce up to 150 tons of Grade 6.0+ liquid ammonia with a moisture content of less than 0.3 ppm.

BOC hopes to have its first unit in production in Asia by 1H02. The ultra-high purity ammonia gas production system is a redesign of an existing unit for BOC. “The design is an improvement on existing units that require frequent downtime for cleaning and regeneration due to unpredictable levels of impurities in the raw ammonia feed stream,” the company says.

USDC seeks FPD RFPs


October 30, 2001

The United States Display Consortium (USDC), aimed at developing the flat panel display (FPD) supply chain, is issuing four new Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and an Open Solicitation for RFPs.

The USDC is looking for proposals from the supply chain infrastructure companies regarding technical approaches and development efforts that will close gaps in display manufacturing capability and materials. All of the RFPs are to be submitted by December 7, 2001.

Examples of some of the RFPs include encapsulation and packaging technology for OLED displays and patterning technologies for OLED cathodes, among others. For a complete description of each RFP and guidelines for submission, visit www.usdc.org/technical/tech_rfps.html.

By Jo McIntyre
Small Times Correspondent

PORTLAND, Ore., Oct. 17, 2001 — When Intel talks, the Oregon legislature listens. And when nearly every large high-tech company located in the state talks, the legislature acts.

By the end of the current session this summer, lawmakers had voted to award the Oregon University System $812 million in

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Laser micromachining is among the
areas to get a boost, with more
money going to Oregon State
University’s microtechnology initiative.
general fund dollars for the coming two years, a $50 million increase over the governor’s initial budget proposal. Further, legislators appropriated $386 million for capital construction, with funds coming from gifts, bonds and fees.

Educators also expect additional contributions from individuals and industry to boost the state’s engineering education. A significant provision in the funding bill was $23 million which was set aside for the five-year, $180 million public-private funding goal to build Oregon State University’s College of Engineering into a top 25 institution.

“It’s something that industry has been basically demanding for several years,” said Chris A. Bell, associate dean of the College of Engineering at OSU in Corvallis. “They need a high quality and a high quantity engineering work force,” yet for years they have had to recruit engineers from outside the state.

In addition to planning for a new engineering building, beefing up faculty and doubling the number of engineering graduates within five years, much of the excitement surrounding the additional funding is due to the MECS, Microtechnology-based Energy and Chemical Systems, research program at OSU, Bell said.

MECS already has $4 million in grants and 20 faculty involved in the multidisciplinary team.

“Our major effort in this area is to apply electronics techniques to microminiaturize devices,” said Kevin Drost, head of the mechanical engineering department as well as the MECS program. Research efforts also include space, bioscience, and military applications.

The legislative lobbying effort was led by Jim Johnson of Intel; Scott Gibson, local venture investor and founder of Sequent Computer Systems; and Skip Rung of Hewlett-Packard. Also helping out was a group of engineers, software developers, venture capitalists, attorneys and other business leaders, who urged lawmakers to make higher education a top priority.

Called the New Economy Coalition, they barnstormed throughout the state with their message that the future of economic development for the entire state depends on an educated work force. Engineering, they argued to convince rural legislators, is the backbone of all natural resource production, whether timber, agriculture, as well as high-tech computer-related manufacturing.

Other key recommendations from the coalition were to support a top-tier biosciences program in the Portland area, enable higher education technology transfer, and ask voters to change the state constitution to allow state universities to hold equity in companies developed through university research.

Lobbying from inside the system were OSU President Paul Risser, who early recognized the need for this effort, Bell said, and OSU College of Engineering Dean Ron Adams, “who came to us from Tektronix with a strong industry and academic background. He understood the big picture very well.” Tektronix, founded by two Oregonians more than 50 years ago, started the high-tech boom in Oregon.

Also helping from the inside was the MECS program, which isn’t just mechanical engineering, Bell noted. The core group of faculty involved in the program come from other engineering disciplines: industrial and manufacturing, chemical, electrical, computer, nuclear, biochemistry and biophysics, as well as researchers from the Colleges of Science, Agriculture and Forestry.

Some of the cooler experiments taking place now are investigating microreactors that can clean up toxic chemicals using catalysts that are almost at the molecular scale, optics using living fish scales as color sensors, and a bioscientific investigation into how leaves cool.

The interdisciplinary approach puts OSU on the leading edge of research programs, Bell said. “We have a good core of people who can work together and cross college boundaries. It’s what we can do well here, because we have a collaborative culture at OSU.”

The College of Engineering hasn’t waited for state money to arrive to get started on their drive to reach the top-25 ranking. Since Fall of 2000, the college has hired 30 new faculty members, using private contributions. It’s easier to recruit top faculty member these days.

“Part of our private fundraising involves raising $65 million for endowed chairs to enable us to bring on 19 new faculty. We hope to have about 200 tenured and nontenured faculty. “There is a sense of excitement here that they don’t see in other universities,” Bell said. “The MECS program is part of that.”

OLED displays gain on LCDs


October 16, 2001

By:

Ruth DeJule

Technical editor, WaferNews

An organic light emitting diode (OLED) display technology has been developed that exhibits up to 16 million colors. Based on Kodak patents, the full-color active matrix OLED developed by eMagin Corp., Hopewell Junction, NY, contains more than 1.5 million individually addressable picture elements.

For objects to look “real,” a display must be able to render a wide range of colors and shades. With a limited color gamut, for example, images may look slightly washed out, appearing more pastel than vibrant. EMagin displays have a balanced full-color spectrum which adjusts the red, green, and blue relative intensities to create an acceptable looking white, stated Webster Howard, eMagin’s VP of technology. Optimal white balance may vary with individual preference but the overall effect is fuller, deeper colors, exceeding that of current notebook-type LCDs.

While LCDs dominate the flat panel display (FPD) market, there is room for improvement, such as better color range and dynamic response for fast-action videos like sports broadcasts. For TV applications, improvement in viewing angle is needed but often conflicts with the response time. And from a cost perspective, they are 2 to 3 times more expensive than cathode ray tubes (CRT). Most R&D laboratories still use CRT displays and miniature CRTs are frequently used in camcorders and other viewfinder applications. CRTs have better temperature and pressure ranges than LCDs; however, size, weight, high-voltage requirements, color resolution limitations, and cost make them a less attractive microdisplay solution, unless extreme operating conditions are required, such as being in the outdoors in the wintertime.

With the advent of laptops, FPDs have offered low power, high luminance, lighter weight, and easy integration with optics. Recently, they have benefited from the capability for integration on silicon ICs to provide system-on-a-chip. High resolution images make them suitable for mobile information products such as portable computers, wireless Internet viewers, portable DVD players, gaming platforms, and wearable computers. Most direct-view color OLEDs use three independent emitting materials to obtain red, green, and blue primaries. In microdisplays, the color subpixels are only a few micrometers wide. Filters are patterned at these dimensions and OLED pixels are made correspondingly small. To enhance color quality, eMagin modifies the color filter structures using a propriety process, said Howard.

eMagin’s 0.62-inch (diagonal) active screen has over 1.5 million potential color subpixel elements (600 X 3 X 852 pixels) and 52 more imaging columns than standard SVGA displays, making it possible for the display to run either 600 X 800 pixels in order to interface to the analog output of portable computers or 852 X 480 pixels in a 16:9 wide screen entertainment format. All the color and luminance value information at each of the pixel elements are stored in the display array to decrease flicker or color breakup.

In the next few years, the industry can expect improvements in life, efficiency, and cost, allowing penetration of OLEDs into market segments currently dominated by LCDs, noted Howard. Large screen OLEDs will take more than a few years.