news digest ♦ compound semiconductor

semiconductors will see strong growth in sales in coming years, especially from high- brightness LEDs as well as from thin-film solar cells. The overall revenues of compound semiconductor products will become more significant compared to silicon. Not more— more significant.

UZ: I don’t think that it is a viable approach to put all “Compound Semiconductor” business under one roof anymore - the applications and markets have become too diverse. Soon it will not really matter anymore, if a power transistor in a power supply or an electric car is made of silicon, silicon carbide or gallium nitride. Not for the engineer who constructs the electronic circuit - but of course the compound semiconductor transistors will perform superior to their silicon cousins.

Cost of materials has always been a concern in this sector. What ways do you see the industry driving down cost and are there areas that you feel could be improved in cost savings?

TH: Everyone has their favorite fabrication technology, whether it’s putting GaN on silicon, or organic semiconductors for roll-to-roll solar cell manufacturing. I’m agnostic about that. The biggest driver from the market point of view is finding a high volume application to drive down manufacturing costs for other applications. This has already happened in some segments. GaAs chips are cheap enough that they appear in mobile phone handsets, but the margins are thinner there, too.

Other drivers are things like industry standards, or government incentives, such as those driving solar cell installations in Germany and Spain.

What I’m not a big believer in is larger wafer sizes. That may be a good move in some cases, but it has be right. A lot of products just don’t merit it. Even in silicon.

UZ: Some of the base materials in our business are scarce and will remain expensive. But with the growing industry also the market for refined base materials will grow and reduce cost. Also

124 www.compoundsemiconductor.net April/May 2010

manufacturing methods will improve further and be more efficient in materials and machine utilization. Take high-brightness LEDs for example - we have come from costly and slow MBE to MOCVD processes, chip sizes have shrunk and wafer sizes gone up. However, it also seems that industry - because of the short-sighted quarterly planning - has lost at least some of its interest in driving R&D forward lately.

What areas of application do you believe will be the most successful for the CS industry?

TH: If successful means the most profit over the longest period, maybe military applications would come out high on the list. Or SiC transistors for power management. It’s hard to say.

A very important segment to watch is high- brightness LEDs. This is set to grow over 50% this year, to $20 billion by 2014. That’s huge growth, all thanks to compound semiconductors.

UZ: LED lighting and solar cells

While recognizing that no-one has a crystal ball, where do you see the industry in three years time? Five years time? Ten years time?

TH: The strong growth in high-brightness LEDs will be the biggest news for this decade. Perhaps mobile phone handsets was the big news of the last one. Solar cells and power transistors will also be important. Since each of these uses a different substrate material, it’s hard to generalize across the whole industry. There will continue to be many suppliers, each specializing in different products. It’s a very fragmented market.

UZ: If the industry itself is not willing to invest and look beyond quarterly reports I will not either.

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