News Article
Kyma's GaN materials help NRL to advance novel optics
The supplier of crystalline aluminium nitride and gallium nitride materials has helped NRL to develop a new technology for commercial and defence applications
Kyma Technologies has helped Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists to demonstrate a novel approach to making mid-infrared non-linear optics.
The products in question are important for a number of commercial and defence applications.
The market for nitride semiconductor devices was approximately $9 billion in 2011, and is expected to surpass $60 billion over the long term, including $30 billion in visible lighting applications and $30 billion in power electronics applications.
Today’s most prevalent approaches to non-linear mid-IR optical materials are based on periodically poled lithium niobate and related materials. They suffer from a dramatic drop-off in performance in the wavelength region beyond 4µm.
Addressing this issue, NRL has developed a dramatically different approach to conventional methods. They alternate the actual crystal orientation of the semiconducting nonlinear material to create promising structures from GaN grown by hydride vapour phase epitaxy (HVPE).
Kyma’s HVPE GaN has very low impurity levels and low defect densities which supports a large transparency window all the way out to 7µm. They also have a high thermal conductivity (over 250 W/m-K), and a high second-order nonlinear susceptibility, all important for non-linear optics applications.
The products in question are important for a number of commercial and defence applications.
The market for nitride semiconductor devices was approximately $9 billion in 2011, and is expected to surpass $60 billion over the long term, including $30 billion in visible lighting applications and $30 billion in power electronics applications.
Today’s most prevalent approaches to non-linear mid-IR optical materials are based on periodically poled lithium niobate and related materials. They suffer from a dramatic drop-off in performance in the wavelength region beyond 4µm.
Addressing this issue, NRL has developed a dramatically different approach to conventional methods. They alternate the actual crystal orientation of the semiconducting nonlinear material to create promising structures from GaN grown by hydride vapour phase epitaxy (HVPE).
Kyma’s HVPE GaN has very low impurity levels and low defect densities which supports a large transparency window all the way out to 7µm. They also have a high thermal conductivity (over 250 W/m-K), and a high second-order nonlinear susceptibility, all important for non-linear optics applications.
