Aixtron SE of Germany reported that UK company Plessey Semiconductors ordered Aixtron’s AIX G5+ C Planetary Reactor®.
Plessey plans to use the metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) system to increase its manufacturing capacity of gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) epitaxial wafers for next-generation microLED applications.
The AIX G5+C MOCVD system offers an automatic cassette-to-cassette (C2C) wafer transfer module, and it has two separate chamber configuration options, which enables 8×6 inch or 5×8 inch GaN-on-Si wafers to be automatically loaded and removed in an enclosed cassette environment. The MOCVD system adds to the company’s existing metal MOCVD reactors from Aixtron, which have configurations of 7×6 inch or 3×8 inch wafers with manual loading.
According to Aixtron, the new reactor’s automated self-cleaning technology ensures the device is clean on each run, thereby helping to produce a very low level of wafer defects and significantly reducing downtime for maintenance. The new equipment also boasts faster ramp and cool down along with a high susceptor unload temperature to reduce the recipe time.
The AIX G5+ C reactor will support Plessey’s plans to increase the research and development capacity of its monolithic microLEDs using the company’s proprietary GaN-on-Si technology. Plessey says its microLEDs provide high brightness and very high pixel density with extremely low power consumption.
These performance characteristics have the potential to disrupt many existing application sectors of conventional display technologies including LCD and OLED. Such microLED displays combine very high-density RGB pixel arrays with CMOS backplanes to produce very high-brightness, low-power, and high-frame-rate image sources for wearable electronics and head-mounted displays, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality systems.
