SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impacts/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that the deposition techniques used to deposit the lattice matching materials are scalable in wafer area to 200mm and 300mm wafer processing and are already found in today's CMOS foundries. Both factors, using large area deposition process and leveraging fully depreciated CMOS fabs, lead to significant reduction in overall packaged device cost. In this fashion, these lattice matching materials on Si will result in a new industry standard wafer from a US company supplying globally 200mm and 300mm wafers to light emitting diode and power semiconductor industries. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is focused on converting the surface of large area silicon wafers into a bulk-like quality Gallium Nitride (GaN). The wafer technology will be used by light emitting diode and power semiconductor manufacturers to grow the brightest and most efficient GaN based devices. The novel technology under this Phase I project is based on depositing a patent pending purely metallic alloy that both grades the lattice constant from Si to GaN and counter balances residual thermal mismatch to maintain a flat wafer. By removing both thermal and lattice mismatch, growth of low defect density GaN is promoted on large area wafers leading to bulk GaN quality material efficiencies.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project addresses a path to achieve the metric of less than $1 per kilolumen in Gallium Nitride (GaN) based light emitting diodes (LEDs). This is expected to spur widespread adoption of solid state lighting which, according to the US Department of Energy, could result in electricity savings equal to the output of 44 gigawatt power plants by 2027. The price for LEDs is slowing adoption. LEDs don't typically need to be better; they need to be cheaper. This project could directly address this adoption problem by lowering the cost of making LEDs by eliminating one of the most expensive steps in the LED production process.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will address the technical problems in Gallium Nitride (GaN) based light emitting diodes (LEDs), namely using traditional buffer layers to grow GaN on non-GaN substrates. Traditional approaches are typically expensive and result in crystalline defects because the buffer materials used are non-ductile crystalline structures which very effectively propagate, rather than annihilate, defects. This project develops a new substrate made with a patented crystalline metal and process that will let the manufacturers spend less time and effort to get the same or even better LED crystalline quality than they can achieve today. Low cost growth techniques are used and to reduce defects in GaN LEDs and to improve the dollar per kilolumen cost to performance metric.