The semiconductor industry is experiencing a continuous growth, being more pronounced for the compound semiconductor industry. These materials present unique properties such as high temperature resistance, enhanced frequency, high band gap and faster operation and optoelectronic features. These key advantages are boosting their demand in the upcoming years driven by several important and strategic industries like 5G, electrical and robot vehicles or VR/AR , that are in need of new levels of efficiency, reliability and performance. Many vendors are focusing on technological advancement in compound semiconductor products and additionally, they are also making huge investments to increase the production to reduce the manufacturing expense and to overcome the challenges in manufacturing plants.
Despite of their appealing properties, the use of these materials has been compromised by the difficulty of their processing. One important contributor to this issue is their natural tendency to get oxidized. Technological developments to improve the protection against oxidation for these materials would bring additional performance increases and at the same time improve the manufacturing yields, having the later a big impact on costs but also on environmental effects.
Our company has developed a new technology to cope with this problem that has been present in the industry for decades and to which the currently applied preventive actions have not been able to provide good results. With our technology, branded as Kontrox™, we have managed to proof reduction of surface defects due to oxidation up to 98% compared to other commonly used techniques.
The objective of this study was to determine the economic and technical feasibility of the Kontrox™ process. In order to achieve, the given objective, two main tasks were planned and implemented:
Task 1: Technical feasibility assessment Conduct device level tests in order to prove the technical feasibility of Kontrox. It included flat sample studies and LED chip passivation to analyse the passivation effect and surface defect reductions in the customer’s Micro LED stack.
Task 2: Revenue model validation A comprehensive optoelectronics market research was conducted. This was done to validate the growth and future developments in the targeted Micro LED market. Based on market research the go-to-market strategy with was compiled.
