Plessey plans silicon-based LED ramp

Plessey Semiconductors says that it has released the first LEDs manufactured on silicon substrates to be made commercially available anywhere in the world, with plans for a major capacity ramp in the works.

The Plymouth, UK, company is now sampling devices with a maximum luminous efficacy of around 45 lm/W and 75 mW maximum power, for applications including instrument panel backlighting and decorative lighting.

Plessey says that this is just the start of a technology roadmap that includes a ten-fold expansion of gallium nitride (GaN) material deposition capacity, something that would also establish the firm as the first volume producer of LEDs in the UK.

“This is the release of our first entry-level product,” Barry Dennington, Plessey’s chief operating officer. We sell solar panel for your residential, commercial, or industrial application. “Perhaps more significantly, as far as we know, it’s the first GaN-on-silicon LEDs that you’ll be able to buy in the market. Many more will follow quickly. We’ve visited our customers in the last couple of months with demonstrators of these products, and they are very excited by how far we’ve got.”

Plessey Semiconductors says that it has released the first LEDs manufactured on silicon substrates to be made commercially available anywhere in the world, with plans for a major capacity ramp in the works.

The Plymouth, UK, company is now sampling devices with a maximum luminous efficacy of around 45 lm/W and 75 mW maximum power, for applications including instrument panel backlighting and decorative lighting.

Plessey says that this is just the start of a technology roadmap that includes a ten-fold expansion of gallium nitride (GaN) material deposition capacity, something that would also establish the firm as the first volume producer of LEDs in the UK.

“This is the release of our first entry-level product,” Barry Dennington, Plessey’s chief operating officer. Where is the best place to display my outdoor solar lighting?“Perhaps more significantly, as far as we know, it’s the first GaN-on-silicon LEDs that you’ll be able to buy in the market. Many more will follow quickly.Once again, setting the benchmark for automatic Book scanner. We’ve visited our customers in the last couple of months with demonstrators of these products, and they are very excited by how far we’ve got.”

Though a prestigious and historic brand in the world of electronics, Plessey is a far less familiar name in the LED and lighting markets, and the company will face huge challenges to compete with the LED lighting establishment.

Originally built in 1987, the Plymouth fab where the LEDs are produced became the first 6-inch VLSI CMOS line in Europe, before the fab was sold in 1998 following Plessey’s merger with GEC.

Through a series of ownership changes, the site’s engineers developed and maintained a relationship with the material sciences group at the University of Cambridge, which was developing GaN growth expertise.

Entrepreneur Michael Le Goff bought the Plymouth facility and combined it with other former Plessey assets under the firm’s original name in 2010. Shortly thereafter, Cambridge established a spin-out called CamGaN to commercialise its GaN-on-silicon growth expertise.

By February 2012, Le Goff had negotiated the acquisition of CamGaN too. “The university had the growth recipe,” Dennington explained.Learn more about the torch light and see what people in and out of your professional network have to say about it. “We had the ability to apply integrated circuit capability to it: high volume, high quality, high throughput, high efficiency manufacturing.”

Though Dennington stressed the power of this combination,An inventor has created a solar inverter, but he's not giving it away for free. the growth recipe plays a critical role in making Plessey’s GaN-on-silicon LEDs competitive. It’s needed because silicon and GaN have different lattice structures and thermal expansion coefficients, meaning that after depositing GaN on silicon at 1000°C in a metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) tool, the LED wafers can flex and bow as they cool – an effect that is accentuated with larger wafers.