INDUSTRY MOCVD


AS THE PRICE OF THE LED light bulbs fall, sales are rising fast. But solid-state bulbs have still got a long way to go before they become the dominant lighting technology – this will require a substantial fall in the cost of the LED chips. One way to contribute to cost reduction is to make more efficient use of the gases and chemicals consumed in the making of an LED. That’s been the goal of our team at Valence Process Equipment (VPE) of Branchburg, New Jersey.


During the last five years, we have been targeting the development of a reactor design with 50 percent higher gas efficiency than traditional MOCVDs that also reduces the need for cleaning and maintenance. We have made great progress, moving quickly from a small-scale, proof-of- concept prototype, to a number of custom systems, and finally on to the release of the first of a family of production-scale MOCVD reactors.


Although the initial focus of this work has been on gas efficiency, the novel reactor design has additional benefits. Its small chamber volume allows fast gas switching while its low thermal mass enables fast temperature ramping. In combination, these attributes lead to a very fast multi-quantum well (MQW) growth cycle time. This not only shortens the overall growth time, with the benefit of higher productivity, but also leads to QW structures with improved interface properties and higher internal quantum efficiencies . This means that LED manufacturers investing in our tool could see a reduction in overall manufacturing cost per device, as well as an increase in lumens-per-watt.


Reactor design Our reactor, which is capable of processing more than 50 2-inch wafers in a single run, is markedly different from the two ‘widely available’ designs on the market. These incumbents use either a


August / September 2013 www.compoundsemiconductor.net 37


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