Views: 0 Author: Site Editor Publish Time: 2023-02-13 Origin: Site
On January 26, AIXTRON SE released a press release announcing the launch of the first fully automatic Asp platform - G10-Asp. The new system meets the growing demand in the field of Micro LED and laser equipment. As the first system in the industry, G10-AsP can achieve robust mass production and meet very high and complex requirements.
Dr. Felix Grawert, CEO and President of AIXTRON SE, said: "Micro LEDs will completely change the display world because they have better durability, longer service life, better image quality and extremely low energy consumption. However, this innovative technology poses a challenge to the production process because it requires the lowest defect level and the highest uniformity rate. Our new G10-AsP provides the industry's first fully automated process, providing the answer to all this. The new system has achieved the highest throughput among similar products, with unprecedented uniformity and defect level. "
Micro LED with the most stringent material requirements and chip size ≤ 10 microns has become a reality for the first time. In addition, G10-AsP also meets the complex requirements of mass production of InP (indium phosphide) lasers and VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting lasers).
The new platform G10-AsP will be officially launched on February 1, 2023 during the Photonic West exhibition in San Francisco, USA. In this event, experts from AIXTRON will show the new system: they will explain all the innovations contained in the new platform, and how it will provide the highest throughput of similar products and maximize the utilization of clean rooms.
The new fully automatic G10-AsP is the largest 200mm AsP batch reactor on the market, equipped with in-situ cleaning and automatic cartridge (C2C) wafer transfer technology. The front end can be equipped with SMIF (standard mechanical interface) pods for the first time to further reduce the exposure of epitaxial wafers in the indoor environment. With the built-in in situ cleaning function, users can reset the chamber conditions as needed - whether after each process operation that meets the most stringent requirements or after the production activities that benefit from the highest throughput. The platform is based on the successful Planetary Reactor technology, which combines the concept of multi-wafer batch reactor with the single crystal wafer rotation to ensure the highest wafer uniformity.
Micro LED will not only be used for the next generation of TV monitors, but also for future smart watches, smart phones, augmented reality (AR) projection or car displays. Analysts predict that this field will become the largest LED market in the next five to ten years.
A major challenge for advanced Micro LED and InP and VCSEL applications to reach a higher level is still uniformity: it is necessary to achieve optimized intra-chip uniformity and inter-chip uniformity during mass production. The new G10-AsP sets a new standard for these values, which improves the performance by two to three times compared with the previous generation of products. Therefore, the fully automatic platform will open a new era for the production of Micro LED and photonic devices, and overcome the main obstacles that previously hindered large-scale production.
Photonic devices such as infrared lasers and detectors have been widely used in the market. In the field of telecommunications, they have laid the foundation for managing the growing volume of data, which is related to the increasing bandwidth requirements. In addition, they also support 3D sensing (for example, for face recognition) and advanced technology for automatic driving: with the continuous development of this technology, the beam must map a larger and wider area. This requires more stringent wavelength tolerance, which translates into very strict requirements for epitaxial deposition. The new G10-AsP can meet this demand by providing significant fine control of epitaxial process, improving material accuracy, reducing defects, and improving production and achieving better uniformity.
In the production of Micro LED, improving uniformity is a prerequisite for economically feasible large-scale production: Micro LED displays rely on special seal or matrix transfer process, where thousands of LED chips (arrays) with a size of only a few microns are picked up and transferred. Since the entire pixel array is transferred from the epitaxial wafer substrate, it needs almost perfect uniformity - it can be expected that no one will buy a smart watch or smart phone with a different color from the other corner of the display screen.
