NEWS ANALYSIS


GaN growth: an extra inch


GaN crystal newcomer, Fairfield Crystal Technology, is ready to take substrates to greater lengths.


WHEN IT COMES TO GROWING high quality, decent-sized GaN crystals, the US government is keen to fund companies that are making it happen.


In the last two years, vertically integrated developer of GaN- on-GaN LEDs, Soraa, has won more than $5 million from DoE agency, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), to develop large area, low cost GaN substrates. Meanwhile GaN crystal developer, Kyma, recently bagged some $3 million to advance its technology for manufacturing substrates, shortly after releasing commercially available 2-inch GaN substrates.


But now, in the same wave of funding, a third company, Fairfield Crystal Technology, has also attracted $1.5 million to develop a new technique to speed up the growth of GaN single-crystal


18 www.compoundsemiconductor.net January / February 2014


boules. Perhaps lesser known in the GaN crystal field, the Connecticut-based crystal developer has been manufacturing semiconductor and optical crystal materials since 2004 − key crystals include AlN, ZnS and ZnO − but started looking at GaN two years ago.


“A lot of organisations take one crystal and focus on that but we’ve looked at different crystals which has given us a good understanding of crystal growth with different techniques, using a range of furnaces,” says chief executive, Andy Timmerman. “You know we’ve done a lot on ZnO, have successfully launched AlN, so we see this as the next stepping stone to advance our crystal growth technology and work it into commercialisation.”


Naturally, government backing helps. ARPA-E sees the material as crucial to a new generation of power devices, hence the hefty


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