November 22, 2010 at 19:26The purest GaN crystals grown in Poland
Surprisingly, the well-known Polish company Ammono was able to furnish giants of the electronics industry, such as Intel, and get the purest crystals of gallium nitride (GaN) - a critical material for electronics of the 21st century.
Simple chemists from Warsaw will now become multimillionaires, and their names will bring them into the pantheon of fame for the electronic industry, writes IEEE Spectrum magazine.
Due to its unique physical properties ( band gap 3.39 eV) and high brightness LEDs made of pure crystal, GaN is widely used to create blue LEDs, semiconductor lasers, microwave transistors and space electronics .
Getting cleaner GaN crystals is a real revolution in electronics, because it will allow you to make better blue lasers, brighter and clearer LED screens and LED bulbs, as well as cheaper electronics.
Polish chemists used a new method of growing crystals under pressure and at temperatures above 1500 ° C, but under such conditions it was impossible to grow a crystal larger than 20 mm. Then they began to look for alternative methods and found an option on how to adapt an effective technology for growing quartz single crystals using gallium nitride using a supercritical fluid .
Ammono method produces crystals up to 51 mm in size. Over the next year, scientists plan to develop a method for cutting crystals into thin "wafers" suitable for the manufacture of substrates in the electronics industry. And if Ammono can increase the size of the crystals even to 100 mm (they plan to do this by 2015), then many electronics manufacturers will immediately begin to use the new material instead of silicon, because in some applications GaN chips have obvious advantages. For example, they do not heat up so much at high voltage, which is critical for automotive electronics.
Industry demand for gallium nitride is growing rapidly. According to experts, the annual GaN market has already reached $ 100 million and will double annually in the foreseeable future. Now the cost of one 51 mm crystal in the market is $ 5000.
Left: the first GaN crystals obtained by Ammono twenty years ago; due to metallic impurities have an unsightly brownish tint. On the right are absolutely pure GaN crystals with the shape of a regular hexagon up to 51 mm in size; product of recent years.
Simple chemists from Warsaw will now become multimillionaires, and their names will bring them into the pantheon of fame for the electronic industry, writes IEEE Spectrum magazine.
Due to its unique physical properties ( band gap 3.39 eV) and high brightness LEDs made of pure crystal, GaN is widely used to create blue LEDs, semiconductor lasers, microwave transistors and space electronics .
Getting cleaner GaN crystals is a real revolution in electronics, because it will allow you to make better blue lasers, brighter and clearer LED screens and LED bulbs, as well as cheaper electronics.
Polish chemists used a new method of growing crystals under pressure and at temperatures above 1500 ° C, but under such conditions it was impossible to grow a crystal larger than 20 mm. Then they began to look for alternative methods and found an option on how to adapt an effective technology for growing quartz single crystals using gallium nitride using a supercritical fluid .
Ammono method produces crystals up to 51 mm in size. Over the next year, scientists plan to develop a method for cutting crystals into thin "wafers" suitable for the manufacture of substrates in the electronics industry. And if Ammono can increase the size of the crystals even to 100 mm (they plan to do this by 2015), then many electronics manufacturers will immediately begin to use the new material instead of silicon, because in some applications GaN chips have obvious advantages. For example, they do not heat up so much at high voltage, which is critical for automotive electronics.
Industry demand for gallium nitride is growing rapidly. According to experts, the annual GaN market has already reached $ 100 million and will double annually in the foreseeable future. Now the cost of one 51 mm crystal in the market is $ 5000.