Substrate developments drive up LED front-end industry expansion
Yole Développement’s ‘LED Front-End Manufacturing Trends report’ highlights three main impacts:
Increased demand for larger size sapphire wafers with big players, such as LG, Sharp or Osram moving to 6 inch wafers and Taiwanese players moving to 4 inch wafers.
Increased demand for PSS that has now become mainstream in the industry (87% share as of Q1-2014), even if some questions remain concerning key patent holders’ strategies. Development of GaN-on-Si and GaN-on-GaN LEDs with both technologies having begun mass production in some companies (such as Soraa for GaN, or Toshiba for
Si).
“New LED substrate is one of the key topics impacting the LED front-end industry”, explained Pars Mukish, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole Développement. “Substrates are clearly shaping this industry with the start of the use of Silicon and bulk GaN as a potential replacement of sapphire.”
“Market penetration of these alternative substrates will be secondary to future improvements in terms of performance and cost.” Otherwise, Mukish concludes that GaN-on-Si and GaN-on-GaN LEDs will not be able to fully compete with sapphire-based LEDs.
Yole predicts that the impact of the sapphire industry on the LED industry is likely to become bigger in the future because of the recent partnership between GTAT and Apple (Q4-2013) to set up a large sapphire manufacturing plant ($1 billion). The plant, having a rough capacity of two times the current qualified sapphire capacity, could totally modify the structure and evolution of the sapphire and LED industries in the next few years.
Related articles and links:
www.yole.fr
www.i-micronews.com
News articles:
LED industry continues to resist GaN-on-Si solutions
Apple set to transform sapphire industry in 2014
Sapphire substrate market to triple as smartphone cover demand rockets
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
