Lightimes Online News and Resources for the LED and Solid State Lighting Industry and its Supply Chain

August 30, 2006...The solid state lighting (SSL) industry is deeply rooted in the compound semi (CS) industry. If you haven't been around compound semi circles recently, you might think that SSL looks like the classic overnight success. Not so. Like so many of the compounds (GaAs for example), today's and tomorrow's GaN-based LEDs that are of the caliber truly robust enough to replace incandescents in general lighting applications are the result of over 20 years of collective work, rooted heavily in MOCVD, the manufacturing platforms that first came to light back in the mid-1980s. When hearing about the recent personnel additions to a USA/Asian company named BridgeLux (ref: Aug. 29 coverage), the significance of those roots came to light. The caliber of people now being recruited into the still-nascent SSL industry is very impressive.

BridgeLux (www.bridgelux.com) stands out as the ideally typical young USA company in the SSL field, full of veteran expertise. I think of BridgeLux as a leading indicator of the real progress going on deep inside the SSL industry. If you don't already know BridgeLux, they're a Northern California-based company that's moving forward especially quickly right now. The company was first established in 2003 as eLite Optoelectronics by former Emcore blue spectrum LED expert, Heng Liu who continues to serve as CTO. Then our longtime friend and colleague, Robert (Bob) Walker, also formerly from Emcore and the man who has served diligently as our perennial co-chair for our annual BLUE SSL Suppliers Forum in Taiwan, took over the CEO reins last year. They've been on a dramatic climb ever since. You can view bios and pictures of the senior management team on their website.

BridgeLux obviously knows what it takes to make truly SSL-worthy blue spectrum LEDs and they're proving high volume capability by already shipping millions of high-end InGaN LED chips per year into the SSL market out of their manufacturing facility in Taiwan. They currently have 25 people in residence at the Sunnyvale headquarters in the USA (i.e. "Silicon Valley), with 15 in Taiwan. Key people most recently added to the BridgeLux roster include Dave Bour as Chief Scientist, Gloria Fan as CFO, and Ghulam Hasain as a senior scientist. They join a cadre of other relative newcomers to the BridgeLux team that includes MOCVD-expert Jeff Ramer (also formerly of Emcore's R&D Lab) and Steve Lester, who made quite a name for himself in high power InGaN chip development while at Agilent (and before that, HP). The collective goal of this especially strong team is simple... to help enabling the SSL industry by getting the manufacturing costs of very high yield, truly SSL-worthy blue spectrum LEDs to an affordable and easily reproducible level.

The addition of Dave Bour as Chief Scientist should contribute significantly to achieving that goal. Dave's coming back to the compounds after a brief stint at Applied Materials (AMAT), hopefully bringing with him the silicon mindset that traditionally enables lower cost manufacturing. Dave, a GaN expert, originally hailed from Agilent, where he attained the prestigious honor of becoming an Agilent Fellow in 2000 (as well as being an IEEE Fellow). He's published over 200 articles and has 60 USA patents to his name. My hunch is that the resulting synergy of Dave plus Heng Liu, Jeff Ramer, Steve Lester and Ghulam Hasain will be something worth watching.

Many of us knew Steve Lester from his Agilent days, and others knew him from the University of Texas at Austin, earning his PhD in 1987. Ghulam Hasnain was formerly VP of advanced technology with LuxNet and brings over 20 years of experience in optoelectronics and holds several patents. Jeff Ramer and Heng Liu have strong industry histories, separately working at Emcore developing the original nitride reactors. To do that, they necessarily had to become superb nitride growers. Jeff, who helped teach our classic InP 101 video workshop at the 2001 Outlook conference (newly renamed CS Vision and totally a CS Online Inc. event now), proved at that he's an all-round compound semi MOCVD expert and a gifted grower. After Jeff went to Veeco with the sale of Emcore's TurboDisc division to Veeco, he worked on a new design of the GaN platform to achieve record uniformity for the critical InGaN active region, which dramatically improved the yield of LED devices.

With the team Bob Walker has now put together, we can expect to see noteworthy yield improvement out of BridgeLux that will help the entire SSL industry. And the addition of Gloria Fan basically represents the caliber of person we really want to attract to the SSL industry. She brings over 15 years management experience to BridgeLux, having served as VP of finance at UTStarcom, most recently serving as their VP of global business operations where she oversaw the company's IPO soon after that company scored the title of one of Business Week's 100 hot growth companies in 2002.

Why do I feel BridgeLux to be ideally typical of what's going on right now? Because they've either attracted especially talented people new to the SSL field, or they've enticed re-entries who originally made their mark in blue spectrum R&D. And that's the kind of talent it will take to get the manufacturing costs down where they need to be. The pattern is very much like what we've seen over the years at Cree: employing the best people in the field and concentrating on lowering costs and increasing yields. My hunch is that will require a more silicon-like manufacturing mindset to get there, which could explain why silicon pros are being attracted to the compound semi industry each day, especially as things stay rather tight in the overall tech sector. The prospects of being on the groundfloor of seeing InGaN LEDs take over first, compact florescents, then halogens, and eventually incandescent lighting applications, is the obvious lure.

Where BridgeLux goes, the SSL industry is likely to follow, and that directly benefits many throughout the CS supply chain. And we can't forget one other addition to the BridgeLux team, my friend Anita Draa, who served with Bob Walker when he ran Emcore's Pacific Rim sales team. Anita's now helping with BridgeLux marketing and herself holds a Ph.D. in chemistry. Now that's my kind of "Marcom" (marketing communication) expert! She understands all levels of the challenge. A lot of those MOCVD platforms out there were originally sold by Bob and Anita. And many more were perfected by the steady and excellent work of Jeff Ramer and Heng Liu. As to what's specifically going on behind the scenes at BridgeLux, and why they're able to attract such high caliber people, all I can say is... Stay Tuned.

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Emcore Sells 49% GELcore Stake to GE; Names Nichia as GE's Strategic PartnerJo Ann McDonald, founding editor

Nichia Begins Shipping Samples of 100 lm/W LEDScott McMahan

Formosa Epitaxy to Open Plant for MOCVD Development and LED ProductionLIGHTimes Staff

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