This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to grow gallium nitride (GaN) single crystals that are large enough to yield commercially-viable non-polar GaN substrates for optoelectronic devices. The feasibility of the crystal growth processes was demonstrated in Phase I. This Phase II project will focus on the reproducibility and scalability of the crystal growth and back-end processing methods. It is anticipated that the resulting per-unit price reduction will accelerate the adoption of GaN substrates by ultra-high brightness light emitting diode (LED) manufacturers. The broader/commercial impacts of this project will be the potential to provide large-area non-polar GaN substrates for applications in advanced GaN-based light emitters such as laser diodes and ultra-high brightness LEDs. GaN-based LEDs present exciting long-term prospects for solid-state lighting, via the replacement of inefficient and/or toxic conventional light sources such as light bulbs and fluorescent lamps. However, the LEDs must be sufficiently low cost and demonstrate high luminous output power to justify the replacement of existing conventional lamps. GaN-based LEDs fabricated on non-polar GaN substrates that will be developed in this project has the potential to meet the most demanding lighting requirements, whereas conventional polar GaN-based LEDs ultimately cannot.
