Translucent has declared the availability of vGaN product line of silicon-based wafer templates commercially. This company is a supplier of rare-earth-oxide (REO) based silicon substrates for applications of epitaxial semiconductors.
The vGaN products offer a superior-quality, cost-effective epitaxial surface for growing gallium nitride (GaN) devices such as field-effect transistors (FETs) or light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
The vGaN devices are the first commercial REO-based series of III-N semiconductors having GaN-on-Si scalable wafers. The utilization of crystalline REO layers enable flatness of wafer and relief of stress through customized lattice engineering, resulting in a superior quality growth surface. Further, REO layer’s broad bandgap is anticipated to impart voltage breakdown characteristics to FETs that are grown on vGaN.
vGaN represents virtual gallium nitride. It offers a semiconductor growth surface with GaN’s physical properties, but uses a silicon-based substrate over which a REO epilayer is formed allowing another upper epilayer of Group III nitrides, for example, GaN.. The vGaN substrate, for the first time, allows growth processes of industry-standard MOCVD with economies of scale and cost-effective structures addressed by the silicon industry at present.
GaN is normally formed upon sapphire substrates. These substrates are considerably costly at larger diameters, particularly 200 mm or even larger. An important hurdle faced by device manufacturers to date is managing costly, heavy, and large sapphire wafers. This may require buying of unique handling equipment in fabrication plants. On the other hand, there already exist plants that are capable of fabricating silicon wafers up to 200 mm. This enables silicon with larger diameters to be a suitable choice for bringing economies of scale into the power electronics (FET) and the lighting (LED) industries. Currently, Translucent’s vGaN wafers of 100 mm diameters are already available in the market and will be followed by the availability of 150 and 200 mm in 2012.
Source: http://www.translucentinc.com/