LED lighting grows rapidly Sapphire shines1

After experiencing a tragic market situation such as overcapacity and a sharp drop in prices, Sapphire has ushered in a new boom this year, and in the LED substrate field, it has established a market dominance with an ultra-high market share. Although some foreign companies are still optimistic about silicon-based gallium nitride and GaN-on- GaN, continue to invest in these two technologies, but because there is no cost advantage, these two technologies are still unable to achieve mass production. And GaN-on-GaN is even more cold. Following Seoul Semiconductor's last year for GaN-on- After GaN waved the flag and shouted a few words, there was no more. The Technology stopped in the laboratory and it was still difficult to get out. The new upsurge of Sapphire has benefited from the rapid growth of LED lighting, and Sapphire has also ushered in a new round of upsurge. Kong Wenjun, the secretary of Crystal Optoelectronics, revealed that with the expansion of the market renewal, the company also plans to expand production of about 30LED sapphire substrates. She said that the company's current Sapphire PSS production capacity is about 150 thousand pieces/year, and plans to expand production to 200 thousand pieces/year before the end of the year. In addition, Dongjing electronics, Jingsheng electromechanical, Dazu laser and other companies are no exception, expanding LED sapphire production capacity, or getting involved in the sapphire industry chain (As shown in Table 1). Although sapphire is known to all for its application in the field of consumer electronics, it has not been widely used in this field. LED is still driven by the demand of sapphire industry. The demand for graphic substrates in the market has also caused the sapphire substrate to heat up rapidly. CSAResearch Research data show that in the third quarter of 2014, the market share of sapphire substrate was as high as 87, unifying the status of substrate Jianghu. Kong Wenjun said that among the Sapphire Substrate products produced by the company, the company's PSS production capacity is still dominated by 2 inch, and the proportion of 4 inch products will be increased this year. On the other hand, the demand for large-size sapphire chips has increased, and many large overseas companies (Such as LG, Sharp or Osram) Towards the production of 6-inch wafers, while Taiwanese companies generally use 4-inch wafers, domestic companies are gradually turning to large sizes. At the end of last year, GTAT and Apple invested $1 billion to establish a large sapphire production plant. It is reported that the production capacity of the factory will be twice that of the existing sapphire production capacity, and the factory will change the structure of the Sapphire and LED industries. At the same time, sapphire substrate cutting equipment also benefited from this upsurge. Zhang Jianqun, the vice-chairman of Dazu laser, said that the company's LED sapphire substrate cutting equipment achieved a revenue of nearly 0. 1 billion yuan last year, and this part of the business was very good at the beginning of this year. In the first quarter, there were already nearly half of the total orders of last year. the overall demand of the industry is large and it is expected to grow high throughout the year. Foreign silicon-based gallium nitride is eager to move. Some overseas companies have mass-produced silicon-based gallium nitride LED (GaN-on-Si). At the end of May, Pres Semiconductor Co. , Ltd. announced that it had ordered CRIUSII- XLMOCVD equipment is used for the production of silicon-based nitrided LED. Dr. KeithStrickland, press' technical director, told the media: in the past year, we have been in GaN-on- The launch of SiLED products has been a great success. At present, plans are being made to speed up production. In order to increase production, and in view of AIXTRON's CRIUSII- XL system performed well, and we have ordered another set of equipment of the same series.