Taiwan's first GaN laser fabricated by the OES Laboratories of ITRI
OES General Director Dr. Yung-Sheng Liu pointed out that following the successful development of GaN LED, it has become obvious that domestic LED industry will focus LED application to illumination field. According to the Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK) of ITRI, in 2000, the global light sources market had a scale of US$8.44 billion, with an annual growth rate of 5%~6%. Amongst all the light sources, incandescent lamps and fluorescent light were the mainstream as the incandescent lamps possessed a 30% market share while fluorescent light for 20%, compact fluorescent light for 19% and halogen lamps for 15%. Different from traditional light sources in light generating principles and structures, LED features compactness, reliability, and solidity, and is ideal for mass production. It is available in various colors and easy to assemble into either mini-sized or large array devices according to application needs. Consequently, it is often adopted to make indoor and outdoor large-sized displays. Furthermore, with the advantages of no filament requirement, low power consumption, short warm-up time, and fast response speed, LED is widely applied to automobiles, communications, consumer electronics, and industrial gauges. OES has been aggressive in LED development, especially for high-brightness LED with broad spectrum of applications. It aims to help local manufacturers to win their market niches in the future illumination industry.
Mr. Jung-Tsung Hsu, OES Deputy Director of Optical Communications and Opto-Electronic Components Division and also the GaN LED project leader, pointed out that the brightness of a traditional LED lamp is less than 0.1W, far from meeting the illumination demand. For the purpose of lighting, it is necessary to use an LED module consisted of a large amount of LED lamps or to enlarge the area of a single LED chip. The new LED module OES developed has the advantage of fine light condensing characteristics, good heat dissipation, and long lifetime. It allows highly efficient operating process and surface mounting device (SMD) packaging. The parallelism of the bean axes between each light source is excellent, making the item proper for multiple and large-sized chip packaging. The technique also simplifies the chip packaging process to reduce the packaging costs. The successful development on GaN LED has made it possible to have white light source. In addition to the mercury-free fabrication process, the item is an energy-saving and environmentally friendly light source. It is also a highly remarked light source of the 21st century, and is expected to enliven the application market for this new generation of white light source.
According to Mr. Jim Chi, Director of the Division said OES has completed technological development of epitaxy, fabrication, and package processes in relation to GaN LD. It utilized metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technique to develop the first domestically made GaN LD. The item upgrades the current DVD format to the HD-DVD level, and provides 15~20 Gbit capacity of storage. Given the current optical disc driver market with a scale of several billion sets, the economic value and market potential of the LD is extremely huge.
OES also introduced its UV GaN LED fabrication technique at the December 28 exhibition. The technique has the advantages of producing invisible light, short light wavelength, and high energy. UV GaN LED can be used for manufacturing of counterfeit currency detectors and disinfecting/deodorizing products. In addition, it has the potential to play a crucial role in the white-light LED once it is accommodated with a proper amount of phosphors. At the exhibition, OES introduced its 2.5 G 850nm vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) technique as well.
In recent years, OES has been aggressively accelerating its development in LED lighting and other innovative product technologies to enlarge the scope of new application fields. In addition to catching up with the R&D standards of international leading lighting firms, OES makes its efforts to meet the demand from the industry, and expects to bring the LED lighting market to a boom, helping domestic manufacturers to grab the global market share.
Mr. Jung-Tsung Hsu
Tel: +886-3-5915072; email: jungtsung@itri.org.tw
Miss Pi-Chen Hsu at
Tel: +886-3-5917624; email: pchsu@itri.org.tw
Miss Linda Cheng at
Tel: +886-3-5913518; email: lindasc@itri.org.tw
E-mail: jungtsung@itri.org.tw
Web site: http://www.oes.itri.org.tw
