Inlustra Starts Nonpolar GaN Production
Inlustra said it is beginning to deliver nonpolar GaN substrates to customers. Started in 2005 as a spin-out from UC Santa Barbara, the company says it has developed proprietary techniques to significantly reduce the number of defects in nonpolar GaN substrates, resulting in improved LED yields.
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 4/14/2009
Inlustra Technologies Inc. (Santa Barbara, Calif.), a spin-out from the gallium nitride (GaN) research laboratories at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said it has started to fill orders for its nonpolar and semipolar GaN substrates. The company’s materials are aimed at the blue and green light-emitting diode (LED) and laser markets.
“We are currently producing sample quantities of our material in a pilot production facility,” said CFO Philipp Bell, adding that the company is “investigating routes to scale up our production capacity.” Sales of Inlustra’s nonpolar GaN substrates started early this year with sizes between 5 × 10 mm and 10 × 20 mm. The company will scale up its process to 2 in. over the next nine months, Bell said.
Although small quantities of nonpolar and semipolar GaN substrates have been available from a few companies, Bell said, “To our knowledge there is no commercial supply for nonpolar gallium nitride wafers in volume, a fact that we are planning to change in the near future.”
The long-term demand for GaN materials is expected to be strong as GaN-based white LEDs used for general lighting begin to replace fluorescent and incandescent bulbs. The Inlustra substrates would be used for the green and blue LEDs, while more conventional techniques can be used to make the red LEDs.
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| Although conventional GaN devices are built on c-plane substrates, Inlustra is producing m-plane and a-plane (nonpolar) material. |
GaN crystals can be cut in various orientations, or planes. Nonpolar GaN technology offers the potential for increased electrical efficiency, reduced electrical resistance, elimination of color shifting with varying operating current, and reduced device sizes, Bell said.
The GaN device industry is presently built upon the c-plane, while Inlustra is mainly producing m-plane and a-plane (nonpolar) material. Inlustra has proprietary crystal growth techniques that significantly reduce the number of defects in the substrates, resulting in improved LED yields, said CTO Paul Fini.
Inlustra’s process is broadly similar to methods used to make conventional silicon wafers, using the seed, growth, cutting and polishing steps. “The growth process, however, is significantly different,” Bell said. “Gallium nitride is actually grown by a vapor-phase epitaxy process and not drawn from a melted source.”
Traditionally, GaN devices were created by depositing a thin GaN film on a foreign substrate, such as sapphire or silicon carbide. However, the lattice mismatch between the two materials introduces billions of defects per square centimeter.
Inlustra was founded in 2005 by Fini and Ben Haskell, who serves as CEO. Haskell was a post-doctoral researcher under Shuji Nakamura, now a professor at UCSB, who developed the first blue LEDs while working at Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. (Tokushima, Japan). Haskell was involved with development of the first planar a-plane and m-plane GaN films grown by hydride vapor-phase epitaxy (HVPE), a method that can significantly reduce the number of defects in the substrates. Fini was the lead researcher of Nakamura’s nitride crystal growth laboratory.
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