GaN-on-Silicon

German-based GaN-on-Si developer ALLOS has applied its technology to large 300 mm epiwafers. ALLOS says that scaling up to 300 mm wafers enables higher production efficiencies and thus lower costs. ALLOS estimates that the higher area utilization alone accounts for a cost advantage of 40% compared to standard LED wafers. Standard 300 mm silicon line tools also offer higher production uniformity and yield.

ALLOS demonstrated the 300 mm scale-up using a reactor made by Veeco who announced selling the first 300 mm GaN reactor to a leading-edge semiconductor fab just some month ago and also showed 300 mm wafer data at CES. ALLOS reports a wavelength uniformity of consistently below 1 nm and "all other production requirements like bow of < 40 µm and SEMI-standard thickness of 725 µm". ALLOS says scaling to 300 mm shows how robust its GaN-On-Si technology is.

UK-based GaN-On-Si MicroLED microdisplay developer Plessey Semiconductor announced that it has developed a 2.5-micron pitch display, improving on its previous 8-micron pitch display it has demonstrated in May 2019 at SID DisplayWeek.

The new display sports a 2000x2000 resolution and is a monochrome blue display. Plessey says that in early 2020 (during CES 2020, in fact) it will demonstrate a full RGB display on one wafer.

In 2018, UK-based GaN-on-Si MicroLED developer Plessey Semiconductor announced a strategic partnership with Taiwan's s Jasper Display Corp (JDC). Under the partnership, Plessey will use JDC's silicon backplane to drive its monolithic micro-LED displays.

Today JDC and Plessey demonstrated the world's first GaN-on-Silicon monolithic full-HD (1920x1080) microLED bonded display. Plessey says that it has succeeded in wafer level bonding of its GaN-on-Silicon monolithic microLED wafers with JDC’s eSP70 silicon patented backplane technology, resulting in microLED displays that contain addressable LEDs. The pixel pitch of this display is 8 microns and the JDC backplane provides independent 10-bit single color control of each pixel.