Equipment and Materials ♦ news digest
Azzurro technology provides the customers with high-quality, crack-free GaN layers on 150 mm (and soon 200 mm) standard silicon wafers with extremely low bow values, enabling the use of standard semiconductor productions facilities. Azzurro says the GaN-on-Si technology, previously not available on large scale wafers, will trigger a new wave of highly efficient and cost optimized components for the LED and power semiconductor industry.
The increasing dynamic of Azzurro’s customers’ design-in and ramp-up activities has driven a swift decision for opening a regional support office, Azzurro’s first outside of Germany and Europe. Azzurro is destined for becoming a major supplier of GaN materials to the semiconductor industry, were Taiwan is offering the right environment and excellent location in Asia.
“As customer support in the design-in phase is pivotal to make the customers’ products a business success, a close contact is absolutely necessary. With the chosen location in Taipei, Taiwan also the Chinese, Japanese and Korean markets can be reached very quickly within two hours flight time.
Azzurro’s aim to enable its customers a fast and smooth product introduction to quickly reap the rewards of Azzurro’s GaN-on-Si technology was the key driver for the move by the company”, says Erwin Ysewijn, VP Sales & Marketing of Azzurro and adds, “This enables us to better understand and resolve customer challenges in a timely fashion and offer professional solutions, in local language, local time zones and with an experienced management team on the ground.”
Translucent touts
commercial availability of vGaN wafer templates
The vGaN products provide a low-cost, high-quality epitaxial surface for the growth of gallium nitride devices such as LEDs or field-effect transistors (FETs).
Translucent, a provider of rare-earth-oxide (REO) engineered silicon substrates for low-cost, high- performance epitaxial semiconductor applications,
has announced the commercial availability of its vGaN family of silicon-based wafer templates.
Translucent says the vGaN product line is the world’s first commercial REO-based family of ‘III-N semiconductors’ with scalable GaN-on-Silicon wafers. Translucent’s use of crystalline REO layers provides stress relief and wafer flatness through customised lattice engineering, leading to a high quality growth surface. In addition, the wide bandgap of the REO layer is expected to lead to much higher breakdown-voltage characteristics for FETs grown on vGaN.
vGaN stands for “virtual gallium nitride.” It provides a semiconductor growth surface that has the physical properties of GaN, but utilises a silicon substrate upon which is grown an epilayer of REO material that accommodates a top epilayer of Group III nitrides such as GaN. The vGaN substrate enables for the first time, industry-standard MOCVD growth processes with the low cost structures and economies of scale currently enjoyed by the silicon industry.
Michael Lebby, Translucent’s general manager, noted, “We are bringing a decade of Translucent REO epitaxial experience to bear on the challenge of enabling GaN growth to scale cost-effectively well beyond current limitations. Our vGaN platform is an ‘on-silicon’ technology, allowing us to harness mature silicon-substrate technologies and their low costs, and we expect this to have an extremely beneficial impact in driving down costs for GaN- based LEDs and FETs.”
GaN is typically grown on sapphire substrates, which are significantly more expensive at large diameters, especially 200 mm and larger. Additionally, a major challenge facing device manufacturers today is the handling of the large, heavy, and expensive sapphire wafers. Such handling may require the purchase of special handling equipment for the fabrication plants. Conversely, the widely-used infrastructure of fabrication plants that are ready to run silicon wafers up to 200 mm already exists. This makes large-diameter silicon an ideal choice to bring economies of scale into the lighting (LED) and power electronics (FET) industries.
Translucent’s vGaN wafers are already available at 100 mm diameters, with 150 and 200 mm becoming
August/September 2011
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 163
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