Graphene-on-SiC - ISOM

NEWS ANALYSIS
this mARCh, semiconductor equipment
manufacturer, AmEC, launched its multireactor
mOCVD cluster tool. At a time
when equipment sales from Western
mainstream suppliers, Veeco and
Aixtron, have stalled on the back of the
sluggish LED market, such a move could
spell business suicide. Zhiyou Du, senior
vice president of AmEC, thinks not.
“Even though we have a recession
right now and the LED market it low, we
strongly believe the market will pick up
by next year,” he says. “As a newcomer,
this is the best time to enter the market.
the customer is under less pressure to
produce and has time to evaluate the
tool.”
“[the downturn] gives us about a year
to qualify the tool with the customer and
have our tool ready for the upturn,” he
adds. so ready or not, what exactly is
AmEC is offering? set-up in 2004, based
in shanghai and widely regarded as
China’s most successful chip-making
equipment supplier, the company’s
main business line to date has been
dielectric etch tools for semiconductor
manufacturers.
Raising hundreds of millions of dollars in
funds from the likes of Goldman sachs,
Qualcomm and samsung Ventures,
AmEC has released etch tool after etch
tool, all of which have been steadily
adopted by Asia-based chip makers.
Now, the business has set its sights
on the solid state lighting market and
introduced “Prismo D-Blue”, a mOCVD
tool for high-volume production of GaNbased
layer structures.
As Du explains, the tool is based on
a four-reactor cluster architecture
reducing its footprint by at least 30
percent relative to competitors’ singlereactor
tools. the four reactors can be
controlled independently, with each
processing up to 54 2-inch wafers
depending on the batch configuration.
2-inch wafer trials have demonstrated
impressive thickness uniformities; 0.4
percent wafer-to-wafer uniformity and
1 percent within-wafer uniformity. And
moving to larger wafer sizes could be
relatively easy.
“We have some uniformity issues right
now, but in general the hardware of
the system will be the same, it will just
require a little bit of process tuning to get
the uniformity right,” says Du.
AMEC sets sights on GaN lighting
As MOCVD tool makers hang on for the LED upturn,
an unexpected entrant from China is hoping
to muscle in on the market share. Compound
Semiconductor looks at AMEC’s master-plan.
16 www.compoundsemiconductor.net April/May 2013