The company made public today the foundation of its new LED business unit, called "Azzurro LED Technologies", dedicating more resources to migrate the LED industry to GaN-on-Si. The new business unit's strategy is to license Azzurro's technology and IP to LED companies.
The LED industry can achieve huge processing cost reductions, massive yield improvements and reduced binning cost with Azzurro's GaN-on-Si strain-engineering technology. To this end the company has already used its template wafers successfully to migrate customers quickly and very cost-effectively to GaN-on-Si.
"And we have also transferred and licensed our template technology successfully", said Alexander Loesing, co-founder and CMO of Azzurro and continued: "We decided the best way for Azzurro to enable the LED market's move to GaN-on-Si is to give our customers access to our technology and IP."
Licensing and transferring the Azzurro LED technologies consists of two phases. Starting with the proven template wafers the customers can assess the potential of GaN-on-Si within a few weeks while being assisted by Azzurro experts during the process: On top of Azzurro's templates the customers are growing their LED structures. Additionally Azzurro can supply full LED epiwafers from the project start to support the customer's move to the easier and higher yielding back-end process for GaN-on-Si.
Subsequently the customer is enabled to migrate LED growth to GaN-on-Si. Experienced Azzurro engineers provide intensive training to the customer and help to transfer Azzurro's growth technology to the customers' epitaxy reactors. During this phase the customer is enabled to grow 150 or 200 mm GaN-on-Si LED epiwafers using Azzurro's technology and IP. In addition to the direct migration to large wafer diameters within a few months a higher yielding back-end process and fewer bins are achieved.
Commenting on the LED industry interest towards GaN-on-Si Alexander Loesing, leader of the newly formed business unit Azzurro LED Technologies, added: "We see very aggressive movers who understand the tremendous advantages from going straight to 200 mm LED epiwafers which can be fed into standard silicon foundries. This saves those players not only the capital expenditure to upgrade their 2" processing to 200 mm but also moves them right away to a variable cost model. With all the cutthroat price competition going on - that is the path to go now!"
About Azzurro Semiconductors:
Azzurro has pioneered the growth of gallium nitride on silicon substrates (GaN-on-Si). The company manufactures epitaxial wafers for LED and power semiconductor applications. The use of Azzurro's large wafer diameter GaN-on-Si strain-engineering technology allows both industries to facilitate standard semiconductor production sites to enable massive cost savings.
About Azzurro LED Technologies:
Different from Azzurro's established wafer manufacturing business this newly formed business unit has the sole purpose to enable the LED industry's migration to GaN-on-Si. All LED experts, facilities and know-how as well as IP within Azzurro are gathered in this business unit to put all necessary resources behind the strategy to demonstrate GaN-on-Si LED in the first phase and in the second phase to transfer and license Azzurro's technology and IP to the LED industry.
