NEWS ANALYSIS
Pavel Shashkov, CTO (left) and Ralph Weir, CEO: Nanotherm is now rolling out its heat dissipation materials high volumes to meet the growing needs of LED makers. [Nanotherm]
Meanwhile, the electrical treatment comprises a sequence of positive and negative voltage pulses to minimise micro- discharges during coat formation and better control porosity and surface roughness.
When asked about the process, Weir quips: “I wouldn’t like to have to kill you”, but confirms: “It is a heavily patented process, but the key is what’s now in the electrolyte and the way the electrical power is applied; an enormous amount of control goes into this.”
But while heavily under wraps, industry players have proven keen to trial the process. In response to supplier demand, the company recently set up its first production line in Cambridge, which according to Weir is ‘ramping up nicely’. And plans are now underway to have two more lines up and running by mid- 2015.
“We’re already supplying to quite a number of people with a lot of our production going out to PCB processing companies that are then taking it out to the LED market,” adds Weir.
For example, Nanotherm has forged a partnership with Scotland-based electronics packaging player, Optocap, already shipping orders to LED customers. And the company has also joined forces with PCB manufacturer, Spirit Circuits, UK, again to supply substrates to LED markets. Weir won’t provide specifics on price, simply saying, ‘we talk about being a Ferrari for the price of a Ford’, but as he asserts: “Our partners
say our substrates outperform any other aluminium boards by 25 to 35 percent.”
“Also thermal PCB copper boards exist that are heavier and much more expensive than our substrates yet we can outperform these by 2 to 3 percent,” he adds.
So where next for the UK-based start-up? According to Weir, while the company’s next production line will service the LED industry, the company is also eyeing power electronics markets. “The reality is the lines can produce materials for either markets,” he says.
What’s more, the company is also developing substrates to rival high performance aluminium nitride ceramic tiles. As Weir explains, during fabrication of the company’s ‘entry-level’ boards, a layer of copper is bonded to the dielectric layer using a 4 μm-thick layer of epoxy adhesive to create the circuit layer.
But the company is also using thin film deposition techniques to directly apply the copper circuit layer, producing a metal-backed PCB with performance to rival that of AlN tiles but at a lower cost.
“Partnerships with existing suppliers in the LED and power electronics packaging markets are key to us... and we will now scale the business up through such partnerships,” he says. “We’ve got the production facilities to be a world player, so now it’s all about that big scale up to reach the big volumes.”
Copyright Compound Semiconductor Issue VI 2014
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