Crystal IS eyes expansion with $5 m fund
Native AlN substrate manufacturer Crystal IS has raised $5 million in its Series A venture funding round.
The company, which was founded in 1997 and is based at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Incubator Center in Watervliet, NY, says that the money will be used to expand production capacity and improve substrate quality.
Glen Slack is chief scientist at Crystal IS and a co-founder of the company. He said: "It is great to see this technology develop to the point where we are poised to make a significant impact on commercial markets."
Crystal IS told CompoundSemiconductor.net that it would continue to expand within its current facility for the moment, but that "aggressive growth plans" meant it would likely have to relocate with the next two years.
The venture funding will be spent partly on more manufacturing equipment, as well as improvements in yield and collaborative device development.
The native AlN substrates developed by Crystal IS offer advantages over foreign substrates such as SiC and sapphire that are currently used in GaN-based LED, blue laser and wide-bandgap electronic devices.
Using foreign substrates inevitably introduces higher defect levels into devices. Manufacturing with native substrates leads to lower defect levels and improved device performance and reliability.
These native materials are typically much more expensive and cannot be grown to such large wafer diameters as their foreign counterparts, but Crystal IS believes that AlN will eventually offer both high-quality and large-diameter substrates.
The Series A investor syndicate included ARCH Venture partners, JVP and 3i. Sean Brownlee from 3i, Zeljka Matutinovic from JVP and Keith Crandell from ARCH have joined the Crystal IS board of directors.
