Kyma Technologies, Inc. announced the commercial availability of 2-inch diameter n-type c-plane GaN substrates. Kyma has produced free-standing gallium nitride products in form factors including c-plane substrate form factors of 10mm squares, 18mm squares, and 30mm diameter rounds, and rectangular non-polar and semi-polar substrates of 5mm x 10mm and larger. However, the company says that its 2-inch c-plane GaN substrates were typically held back from commercial sales for use in government contract programs or internal R&D. Improvements in the manufacturing of 2-inch substrates has allowed the company to release more of this product to commercial customers.
Kyma Chief Marketing Officer, Ed Preble, notes, “GaN substrates allow for GaN-on-GaN growth, which results in devices that have double the thermal conductivity and 100-1000 times fewer crystal defects. Improvements to these two material properties are critical for boosting device performance and reliability.”
Kyma says that most LED manufacturers currently use 2-inch sapphire wafers in MOCVD GaN epitaxy systems and also in a number of post-epitaxy wafer processing systems. The company asserts that for this reason providing this wafer shape is critical to enabling bulk GaN wafers to penetrate into the existing GaN device markets. Kyma claims that GaN on GaN device growth offers addition to the thermal conductivity, a shorter and simpler epitaxy recipes, higher current density and/or smaller device footprint, no wafer bow after epitaxy, and simpler designs for vertical device geometries.
