Veeco and ALLOS demo 200mm GaN-on-Si wafers for blue/green micro-LED adoption

Veeco Instruments Inc of Plainview, NY, USA has completed a strategic initiative with technology engineering & IP licensing firm ALLOS Semiconductors GmbH of Dresden, Germany to demonstrate 200mm gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) wafers for blue/green micro-LED production. Veeco teamed up to transfer ALLOS’ proprietary epitaxy technology onto its Propel single-wafer metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) system to enable micro-LED production on existing silicon production lines.

“With the Propel reactor, we have an MOCVD technology that is capable of high-yielding GaN epitaxy that meets all the requirements for processing micro-LED devices in 200mm silicon production lines,” comments ALLOS’ CEO Burkhard Slischka. “Within one month we established our technology on Propel and have achieved crack-free, meltback-free wafers with less than 30μm bow, high crystal quality, superior thickness uniformity and wavelength uniformity of less than 1nm,” he adds. “Together with Veeco, ALLOS is looking forward to making this technology more widely available to the micro-LED ecosystem.”

Micro-LED display technology consists of <30μm x30μm red, green, blue (RGB) inorganic LEDs that are transferred to the display backplane to form sub-pixels. Direct emission from these high-efficiency LEDs offers lower power consumption compared with organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and liquid crystal displays (LCDs) while providing superior brightness and contrast for mobile displays, TV and wearables, it is claimed. The manufacturing of micro-LEDs requires high-quality, uniform epitaxial wafers to meet the display yield and cost targets.

“In contrast to competing MOCVD platforms, Propel offers leading-edge uniformity and simultaneously achieves excellent film quality as a result of the wide process window afforded by Veeco’s TurboDisc technology,” claims Peo Hansson Ph.D., senior VP & general manager of Veeco MOCVD operations. “Combining Veeco’s leading MOCVD expertise with ALLOS’ GaN-on-silicon epiwafer technology enables our customers to develop micro-LEDs cost effectively for new applications in new markets.”