Showing posts with label HB LEDs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HB LEDs. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

US DOE publishes solid state lighting manufacturing roadmap

USA: Last week, the US Department of Energy (DOE) published the Solid-State Lighting Manufacturing R&D Roadmap, the outcome of two workshops and considerable dialog between manufacturers, suppliers, researchers and other organizations involved in expanding solid state lighting (SSL). The purpose of the roadmap was to guide the US DOE R&D program, help act as a guide for equipment and material suppliers, and reduce risk and manufacturing cost.

The document can be downloaded from the DOE.

SSL manufacturing roadmap priorities
The manufacturing roadmap focuses on identifying priority needs for achieving cost-effective, high quality manufacturing capabilities for SSL components ranging packaged devices, replacement lamps, and complete luminaires, in both OLED and LED technologies. In high-brightness LED packages, the report focuses on four key manufacturing needs:

* The need to advance the epitaxy process and equipment to improve wavelength uniformity and reproducibility, reduce variations in chip output power, increase throughput, and improve yields.

* The need to address substrate-related issues, ranging from warping and defects in present materials to cost and availability of potentially better approaches such as native substrates.

* The lack of suitable manufacturing equipment. Increased automation should be introduced into the wafer processing, die packaging and testing activities. A lower cost-of-ownership for all equipment is required.

* The inadequacy of process controls. There is a need for improved inspection and testing equipment in a number of areas including epitaxial growth, wafer processing and die packaging throughout the process. Active feedback control for critical process steps such as epitaxial growth is also required.

Epitaxial growth is the key enabling technology for HB-LEDs. Several critical issues regarding epitaxial growth equipment and processes were identified, including wavelength uniformity, low throughout, lack of in-situ monitoring, and managing wafer bow.

All GaN-based HB-LED epiwafers are currently manufactured using MOCVD, the only technology currently capable of growing all layers of the device structure. The primary drawback of MOCVD is the relatively slow growth rate, resulting in long cycle times (typically 5-10 hours). Actions to increase the growth rate, reduce the overall cycle time, or expand the reactor capacity are required to raise throughput.

Hydride Vapor Phase Epitaxy (HVPE) is a potential alternative growth method which has the advantage of significantly higher growth rates and offers the prospect of much higher throughputs.

The substrate roadmap supports two paths: improved substrates for heteroepitaxial growth (sapphire and SiC), and improved substrates for homoepitaxial growth (GaN). In both cases, the report concludes that “improvements in substrate quality (surface finish, defect density, flatness, etc.) and product consistency are required in order to meet the demands of high volume manufacturing. For GaN substrates cost must also be dramatically reduced in order to become a viable option for LED manufacturing.”

Better cost of ownership model
During the DOE workshops, there was a general agreement that equipment improvement was required to advance process control, manufacturing throughput and yield. The need for an accurate cost model was the main take-away from these discussions with many participants saying that such a model would have much wider application in identifying areas in the packaged LED process which had the largest impact on ultimate device costs.

Such a model would allow the community to identify equipment and processes lying on the critical path and offer a more quantitative assessment of the beneficial cost impact of addressing each issue.

The total cost of ownership (COO) is the widely used in the semiconductor industry (see SEMI standard E35 ‘Cost of Ownership for Semiconductor Manufacturing Metrics’) and its applicability to LEDs may merit further discussions between manufacturers and suppliers. COO can be defined as the full cost of embedding, operating and decommissioning a system needed to accommodate a required volume.

It is the total cost of producing a good part from a piece of equipment, which is obtained by dividing the full cost of the equipment and its operation by the total number of good parts produced over the commissioned lifetime of the equipment. In addition to new equipment purchases and manufacturing process changes, COO can help with decisions about materials use, equipment operations and process improvements. It can help identify any bottlenecks in the process, and it can foster communication and understanding throughout the supply chain.

The DOE has announced intentions to continue the manufacturing workshops in 2010. It is expected that many of these issues, including the development of a better cost model, will be discussed in greater detail.

Source: SEMI, USA

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

HB LED market poised for rapid growth in 2010 and beyond

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Continuing the trend of recent years, high-brightness LED market growth for 2008 was 11 percent, reaching $5.1 billion, in spite of a shaky fourth quarter.

However, a decline of 3.7 percent is expected for 2009, resulting in a market size of $4.9 billion. This decline will not affect all HB LED market segments equally. For example, although some of the more mature markets such as automotive lighting, mobile phones, and outdoor video screens are experiencing substan tial downturns, other emerging segments such as backlights for LCD displays in notebook computers and TVs are showing strong growth.

Moreover, the LED lighting market is also continuing to grow, although at a somewhat slower pace than in recent years. According to market research firm Strategies Unlimited in its recently released report: High-Brightness LED Market Review and Forecast – 2009, lighting and LCD backlighting are the applications that will drive market reco very in 2010 and over the next five years, with market growth forecast at a CAGR of 24 percent, reaching $14.9 billion in 2013.

In all market segments, the penetration rates for the use of HB LEDs continue to grow. The fundamental drivers for HB LED adoption have not changed. It is the impact of the worldwide economic recession on end product demand, rather than any slowdown in the rate of HB LED adoption, that is causing the HB LED market to dip in 2009.

As noted above, lighting and LCD backlighting are providing strong counterweights to the decline in other segments, and they have moderated the rate of overall HB LED market contraction.

The new Strategies Unlimited report is the tenth from the company on LED applications and markets. It analyzes the HB LED market in depth, from both the demand side and the supply side, including supplier market shares. Detailed quantitative market analysis is provided, including breakouts by application and product type, in terms of units, ASPs and revenue. Five-year market forecasts are provided for each application and HB LED product type.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Nanometrics receives multiple system orders for HB LED metrology

MILPITAS, USA: Nanometrics Inc., a leading supplier of advanced process control metrology systems used primarily in the manufacturing of semiconductors, solar photovoltaics and high-brightness LEDs, announced orders for one VerteX and multiple RPMBlue photoluminescence (PL) mapping metrology systems.

The VerteX system is expected to be qualified into a new HB-LED development line, and the RPMBlue systems are expected to be qualified into the high-volume manufacturing line of a different customer. All systems are expected to be qualified in the third quarter of this year.

“Our customers are leveraging the increased capability of the VerteX system to address challenges in the rapidly-growing HB-LED market. New end-device deployments in area lighting, LCD back-lighting and an increased understanding of the performance and cost-of-ownership benefits of high-brightness LEDs are driving HB-LED development,” commented Tom Ryan, Director of the Materials Characterization Business Unit at Nanometrics.

“Our PL mapping products are well-positioned to support increased development and rapid production ramps as new high-brightness LED manufacturing technologies come online.”

The VerteX PL mapping system provides a combination of metrology technologies to support both process development and production control. The VerteX is capable of supporting epitaxial layer metrology on many substrate types and sizes and, due to the illumination system options, can cover the entire spectrum of LED technologies from UV-LEDs through the visible colors to infra-red.

Nanometrics’ newest product for HB-LED process control is the RPMBlue. This is targeted at production control of Gallium Nitride (GaN)-based blue HB-LEDs that are increasingly used in LCD back-lighting. The system has been optimized for industry-leading throughput of up to 80 two-inch GaN wafers per hour.

Because of the available features and performance, Nanometrics believes its PL mapping systems are used by over 90% of the top-tier HB-LED manufacturers in development and production.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Many patents in LED industry to expire in 2010!

DUBLIN, IRELAND: Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Research Report of Global and Chinese Light-Emitting Diode Industry, 2009" report to its offering.

Light-emitting diode is one of the semiconductor diodes, which can turn electrical energy into luminous energy and emit visible light in various colors, such as yellow, green, blue, etc, as well as invisible light, such as infrared and ultraviolet light.

Compared with small incandescent bulb and the neon lamp, light-emitting diodes are specially characterized with low operating voltage and electric current, high reliability and long performance.

The entry barriers of the light-emitting diode industry from the upstream to the downstream are cut down gradually. The upstream industry includes mono-crystalline chip and the epitaxial wafer while the middle stream industry is mainly engaged in chip processing and the downstream industry handles packaging, testing and application.

The upstream and middle stream industries, most competitive and risky fields on world market, have higher technical contents and require more investments. In the industrial chain of light-emitting diode, epitaxial wafer and chip account for about 70 percent of profits and the packaging accounts for 10 to 20 percent of profits, with 10-20 percent held by application field.

Under international energy crisis and the gradual improvement of the environmental protection requirements, the semiconductor light-emitting diode lighting, long performance, energy saving, safe, green and environmental protection, abundant colors and microminiaturization, has been recognized as the only one manner of energy saving and environmental protection in the world.

The semiconductor lights, adopting light-emitting diode as the new lighting source, only run up one tenth of the electricity compared with the ordinary white light lamps and the performance can be postponed ten folds at the same brightness.

In 2007, the total amount of the global LED market exceeded $6 billion, up by 13.7 percent over the previous year. During 2006 to 2012, the annual compound growth rate of the global LED market will reach 10 percent, most of which will mainly be contributed by the ultra high and high brightness LEDs.

The global LED industry is mainly concentrated in Japan, Taiwan, Europe, America, South Korea, China, etc. Japan, the largest producer of the light-emitting diode industry in the world, holds 50 percent of the market share.

Nichia Corp. is the world's largest provider of the high-brightness light-emitting diodes. Toyoda Gosei Co. Ltd is the world's fourth largest and Japanese is the second largest manufacturer of the light-emitting diodes.

Osram Opto, located in the Europe and America, is the world's second largest and European is the largest manufacturer of the high-brightness light-emitting diodes. Taiwan, the global production base of the consumption electronic products, is mainly engaged in the production of the visible light-emitting diodes.

Taiwan is also the world's largest downstream packaging and middle stream chip production base.

With more than 30-year development, Chinese light-emitting diode industry has formed the basically complete industrial chains, covering the LED inside, epitaxial wafer, chip package and application.

At present, China has over 600 LED enterprises specializing in the downstream packaging and application. But the development of the epitaxial wafer and chip is comparatively backward. There are only about 10 enterprises engaged in the production of the epitaxial wafer for LED, as well as few chip manufacturers. So, the yield capacity enjoys a high degree of concentration.

With gradual enhancement of the luminous efficiency and application technologies, the application of the light-emitting diodes has been transferred from the initial indicator lights to screens, such as the landscape lighting, backlight, automobile lights, traffic lights, lighting areas, etc.

The application of the light-emitting diodes is now in diverse development. It is predicted that the average compound growth rate of sales of the display light-emitting diodes will be above 15 percent in 2006 to 2010 and the annual average compound growth rate of sales of the landscape lighting will reach over 35 percent, with the annual average compound growth rate of sales of the backlight light-emitting diodes at more than 30 percent.

In 2010, many patents in the light-emitting diode industry will expire. Chinese enterprises are expected to break through the shackles of the intellectual property rights from European, American and Japanese giants. They should make good use of huge market bases and abundant labor resources in order to occupy a place in the global light-emitting diode market.