BluGlass Ltd of Silverwater, Australia – which was spun off from the III-nitride department of Macquarie University in 2005 to develop a low-temperature process using remote plasma chemical vapor deposition (RPCVD) to grow materials including gallium nitride (GaN) and indium gallium nitride (InGaN) on glass substrates – has completed the installation of an RPCVD chamber upgrade which is now fully operational.
The new chamber installation is part of BluGlass' scaling plans for the commercialization of RPCVD and has been designed to improve the uniformity of the low-temperature manufacturing process. This upgrade has been implemented on BluGlass' smaller RPCVD chamber (the BLG-180). Upon optimizing the new chamber on the BLG-180, BluGlass expects to similarly upgrade its larger RPCVD chamber (BLG-300).
BluGlass is currently focused on demonstrating LED efficiency improvements with several major LED players. In addition to these industry collaborations, BluGlass is also required to demonstrate the scalability of RPCVD technology in order to align with current LED manufacturing capabilities within the industry. While BluGlass has to date retrofitted both Veeco and Aixtron deposition systems, these are relatively small by today's LED manufacturing standards. Following a successful demonstration of uniformity, a similar upgrade will be fitted onto BluGlass' larger RPCVD system. The firm also intends to work with manufacturing partners for further scaling of the systems to commercial production standards using the same scalable design approach currently being tested on-site at BluGlass.
The upgraded chamber has been designed to build on and improve current performance data, including both thickness and performance uniformity using an easily scalable chamber design that can be applied to larger deposition areas. BluGlass says that it chose to implement this design on the smaller of the two RPCVD systems to avoid any disruption to ongoing collaborations with its industry partners that continue to make positive progress using its larger RPCVD system.
