Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology’s orders reach record high
Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology (OIPT) recently won an order from a leading manufacturer of HB-LEDs for three Plasmalab®System133 ICP380 plasma etch tools for use in High Brightness LED (HB-LED) manufacturing. This order is the first of a potential total of up to fifteen systems from this important Asian HB-LED manufacturer that may be required over the next 12 months, and validates OIPT’s position as a key supplier in the HB-LED market.
This order also comes on top of what has proven a very successful month for OIPT with orders placed for over 20 systems. This makes October 2008 the fourth highest order month in the company’s history, consolidating an extremely successful 12 months which has already seen the first and second highest order months.
Mark Vosloo, Sales Director for Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology is clearly delighted with this result, “The combination of a highly motivated, experienced and skilled sales team, selling excellent systems and process capabilities, means that OIPT has been able to remain extremely competitive and increase its order levels, even during such challenging times. OIPT is able to use its capabilities to enter newer markets such as photovoltaics and LED lighting, where our leading edge technologies are in increasing demand and our wide range of products such as plasma etch and deposition, atomic layer deposition and ion beam etch and deposition contribute to our success.”
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories orders 6 systems from Oxford Instruments
Oxford Instruments recently won an order for 6 systems to equip the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), California, USA, a DOE user facility for nanoscience and a centre of excellence in scientific research. The Oxford Instruments systems ordered comprise 6 tools – 3 ICP Plasma etch systems, 2 Plasmalab®80Plus tools, and a FlexAL® atomic layer deposition tool. The systems will enable users at the Molecular Foundry to utilise plasma based etching and deposition to pursue pioneering research in nanoscience. The ICP systems and FlexAL will have new capabilities tailored to Berkeley Lab’s specific research requirements.
The Molecular Foundry is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national user facility charged with providing support to nanoscience researchers in academic, government and industrial laboratories around the world. It also provides users with instruments, techniques and collaborators to enhance their studies of the synthesis, characterisation and theory of nanoscale materials.
As a leading provider of high technology tools and systems, Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology (OIPT) is involved in a long term collaboration with the prestigious LBNL research institute. The collaboration includes OIPT’s funding of a Post doctoral fellow at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, looking specifically at advanced process control for nanoetching, and demonstrating OIPT’s continuing involvement in scientific research.
The Oxford systems will enable the Molecular Foundry in areas such as etching of micro and nano-scale silicon features with ultra-smooth sidewalls, pattern transfer of sub-20 nm features and beyond, plasma etching for nanoimprint lithography templates and printing, and sub-nanometer control of conformal film deposition.
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Oxford Instruments - TDI develops new technique for HVPE growth of InGaN
Green-blue- violet light emitters based on III-nitride compounds are typically fabricated utilizing InGaN alloys in active region of the optoelectronic devices. Most of these materials are grown by metalorganic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).
TDI, an Oxford Instruments company, has recently advanced the Hydride Vapour Phase Epitaxy (HVPE) technology to the growth of InGaN. HVPE is best known for its capability to grow low defect, crack free, high quality quasi bulk GaN and AlN materials at a significantly high growth rate of up to 100 µm/hour.
Based on GaCl3-InCl3-NH3 system, the new HVPE technique developed by the team at Oxford Instruments-TDI is able to precisely control the growth rate of InGaN down to 1-2 µm/hour and Indium content of up to 43%.
The technique of X-ray diffraction reciprocal space mapping (RSM) is used to study the strain relaxation of the InGaN layers. The studies show that low In-content InxGa1-xN (x~0.08 to 0.15) layers were either fully strained or partially relaxed, with relaxation strongly depending on layer thickness and full relaxation for higher In-content layer (x~0.2 to 0.4). The results were recently presented at the Second International Symposium on Growth of III-Nitrides in Izu, Japan and the 2008 International Workshop on Nitride semiconductors in Montreux, Switzerland.
“This study further confirms the ability of HVPE to grow high quality InGaN layers and extend its capability for blue-green LEDs production in the near future,” commented by Dr. Alexander Syrkin, Deputy Director and team leader for the InGaN project at TDI.
Recently, the study on the growth of InGaN by HVPE at Oxford Instruments-TDI was rewarded with a substantial funding from a US government agency. “We are very excited and honoured to be part of the US government research program. We strongly believe that we are just at the edge of discovering the substantial potential of the HVPE technology for the solid state lightning industry in the near future,” commented by Bernard Scanlan, General Manager at Oxford Instruments-TDI.