- 24th October 2006 -

US Army Supports Kyma Native Non-Polar GaN substrates

Kyma Technologies announced selection for Phase I funding under the US Army’s Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program. The STTR effort will focus on the development of native crystalline non-polar GaN substrates.

Non-polar GaN substrates are of great interest to the nitride semiconductor device community because they enable the deposition of improved device active regions that can be used to realize new and improved high performance optoelectronic and electronic nitride semiconductor devices.

Kyma will work with academic partners to better understand and improve its current approaches to making non-polar GaN and will also investigate alternate approaches, with the ultimate goal of establishing a cost effective supply of non-polar GaN that will be used for a broad range of military and commercial applications.

Kyma’s engineers will work closely with the academic research groups led by Professor Mark Johnson at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Professor April Brown at Duke University. Professor Johnson’s group has already investigated the electrical and structural properties of Kyma’s GaN materials and has worked with Kyma on novel approaches to manufacturing non-polar GaN.

Professor Brown will extend her current programs in advanced epitaxial growth and characterization of non-polar GaN materials to Kyma’s low defect density substrates. The collaborators hope to gain new understanding of the physical properties of Kyma’s non-polar GaN substrates, including the ability to deposit high quality device layers thereupon.

Kyma co-founder and CTO Drew Hanser commented, “This program enables us to accelerate the development of non-polar GaN materials with ultra-low dislocation densities and zero stacking faults. Kyma’s non-polar GaN offers a range of new possibilities in terms of device design and the potential to enable better device performance across several different semiconductor device types, including field effect transistors, heterojunction bipolar transistors, and visible and ultraviolet emitters and detectors.”

Kyma president and CEO Keith Evans added, “Support on this U.S. Army STTR is an important contribution to our overall effort to provide our customers with a full suite of best-in-class crystalline GaN and AlN materials and services. Non-polar GaN represents an exciting addition to our growing product line because of its strong potential to impact a broad range of military and commercial applications.”

Leading semiconductor experts have predicted that non-polar GaN will enable higher quantum efficiencies and improved electrical characteristics for LEDs and laser diodes and will enable the development of very high performance eHEMTs. While such predictions have been partially corroborated by experiment, previous attempts to fabricate devices on non-polar GaN were severely hampered by the presence of very high defect densities in the active regions which had origins in the substrates and which derived from the heteroepitaxial approaches used in the non-native approach to their fabrication. Kyma’s native boule growth approach provides a direct route towards slicing and polishing non-polar GaN and provides key benefits in terms of lower defect densities, process scalability, and manufacturing cost structure.

Web: www.kymatech.com