[High-tech LED Magazine Reporter] In September 2011, Bill Watkins, CEO of LED chip manufacturer Bridgelux (hereinafter referred to as "Puri Opto"), revealed that the company plans to lay off 250 employees at Livermore headquarters. 53 of them, about one-fifth. At the same time, the company decided to shift its focus from sapphire substrate LED manufacturing to lower cost silicon substrate LED manufacturing.
Silicon substrate technology has once again become the focus of the global LED industry. In the upstream map of China's LED industry, silicon substrates have been praised by the industry for "breaking the core technology of monopolizing LED chips in the United States and Japan, and coming out of a road with LED development with Chinese characteristics."
Since its establishment in 2006, Jingneng Optoelectronics (Jiangxi) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Crystal Optoelectronicsâ€) has attracted many overseas investment funds by virtue of its breakthrough in blue LED materials and chip technology on silicon substrates.
Among them, a fund focused on investing in China's early high-tech companies, the Jinshajiang Venture Capital Fund (hereinafter referred to as “Jinshajiang Venture Capitalâ€), decided to gamble after three years of due diligence. In 2006, Jinshajiang Venture Capital joined Mayfield and Yongwei Investment to invest 10 million US dollars in Jingneng Optoelectronics. A year later, the money was spent. Wu Shenjun found Temasek and Kaipeng Huaying, and Jingneng Optoelectronics received another 40 million US dollars. But the rate of burning money is still beyond expectations. Therefore, at the end of 2010, when the capital chain was tight, Wu Shenjun, the then chairman of Jingneng Optoelectronics (the managing director of Jinshajiang Venture Capital), once again found a capital injection of $55.5 million including IFC and Haiyide Investment.
Since the second half of last year, due to the expansion of raw materials and domestic MOCVD installed capacity, and the terminal market has not exploded as expected, the structural overcapacity of the LED industry has become a reality. From raw materials to chips to end products, without exception, the industry entered the shuffling period in advance.
Many people in the industry have asked: "Look at who is investing now? Most of them are not the capital of the LED industry." In fact, we can see that many foreign funds flow into the LED industry, the technical context of these venture capital to the LED industry, Most of the development trends are not well understood, lack of sufficient technical reserves, market preparation, manufacturing quality control capabilities, and there are large blind investment costs.
Although Jingneng Optoelectronics' external operating data shows that in 2010, the company's main business income exceeded 100 million yuan, with a gross profit margin of nearly 40%. It is estimated that the company's operating income will exceed 300 million yuan in 2011, and its operating income will reach 1 billion yuan in 2012. However, in the past seven years, under the leadership of Wu Shenjun, Jinshajiang Venture Capital has bet more than 100 million US dollars of venture capital (including the investment of other venture capital funds) in Jingneng Optoelectronics. In the LED industry chain, the investment amount of Jinshajiang Venture Capital is as high as nearly 200 million US dollars, and the number of LED companies invested has reached 8, which accounts for a three-thirds of the total amount of 700 million US dollars managed by Jinshajiang. one.
Silicon substrate encounters chasing
Recently, the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) announced the use of Applied
Materials' MOCVD has successfully produced gallium nitride silicon chips with no cracks on the surface and bends less than 50 microns on 200 mm (8 inch) silicon wafers. IMEC's ​​new technology demonstrates production using standard CMOS processes and verifies that all devices require only minor adjustments in software and hardware. Obviously, this is an important milestone for silicon-based LED chips to achieve mass production and compatibility with traditional semiconductor processes.
At the same time, gold is used in the circuit connection and gate structure of GaN products, but it makes GaN processing incompatible with CMOS processes. and
IMEC solves compatibility problems based on gold-free circuit-connected systems and metal-free metal-insulated semiconductor (MIS) gate structures.
Previously, Professor Jiang Fengyi of Nanchang University, one of the owners of the crystal energy silicon substrate, said in public that the current price of bonding gold for silicon substrate chips is high, and an alternative is to be found. Insiders said: "If IMEC's ​​gold-free solution is adopted by the industry, it will undoubtedly put pressure on the future silicon chip cost control of Jingneng Optoelectronics."
“The biggest advantage compared to sapphire substrates and silicon carbide is the cost. The cost of the silicon substrate itself is very low. Coupled with some production process advantages, the cost is far less than the current mainstream sapphire and silicon carbide substrates. The LED chip." This is a sentence that Jingneng Photonics employees often hang on their lips.
However, the claim of cost advantage has been rejected by the industry. "Carbon silicon is basically a monopoly of Cree, and it is basically difficult for the outside world to know its true cost. Now the price of the 2-inch sapphire substrate has dropped to 8 US dollars. Compared to a 2-inch silicon substrate of 5 to 6 US dollars, silicon substrates have been difficult to have many advantages. However, silicon substrates with a cost advantage of more than 4 inches are not yet fully capable of mass production."
If the cost advantage is not there, then the only thing that can really attract people is the “independent silicon technology that is touted by Zhang Dapeng, the chief operating officer of Jingneng Optoelectronics, to break the international monopoly in the LED industry.†But when the reporter went to the industry on patent issues When people ask for advice, they get completely different opinions.
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