USA: As the industry’s most diverse and international exposition, SEMICON West is always an event where semiconductor technology can be seen entering new and emerging markets. Flat panel display and photovoltaics are examples of two such markets where today’s leading manufacturing technologies, processes and products had their origins at SEMICON West.

This year's Emerging Markets TechXpot continues this tradition, highlighting the latest applications and markets in advanced manufacturing. This year’s Emerging Markets TechXpot spotlights the surprising recent progress in solid-state lighting, the major advances in printed and flexible electronics, and the changing mobile energy world of thin-film batteries and energy harvesting.

Flexible printed electronics fabricate large arrays of high performance transistor devices by direct patterning of single crystals onto clean silicon surfaces. These technologies will be incorporated into a multitude of products, including clothing, health care items, displays, and more. Proponents predict, “A new electronics revolution will be launched, integrating electronics into all aspects of our lives.”

“We’re seeing a lot of evolutionary change and hybrid approaches,” said Kevin Cammack, director of technical marketing and industry development for the US Display Consortium, noting technologies ranging from modifying standard vapor deposition to use on new clear plastic substrates to ink jetting new organic semiconductor contacts onto fabricating traditional single-crystal silicon solar cells. Also driving some current interest is the inherent “greenness” of the printing approach, with its smaller bill of goods, less exotic materials and lower energy consumption.

“The $100B display industry is going to be the big driver, especially for hybrid technologies designed to take advantage of the existing $120B in fully depreciated manufacturing capacity to make lower cost or lower power displays,” he said, noting that most of the new technologies coming online for flat panel displays (FPDs) are inherently flexible, and progress is being made on many fronts. New developments include clear flexible substrates that can be processed at up to 350°C without softening or hazing, and new processes that allow transistor deposition at temperatures as low as 300°C.

Solid State Lighting
Solid-state lighting technology has made impressive gains in recent years as electricity costs soar and LED cost and efficiency improve.

market by 2012. Robert Steele, director, optoelectronics, for Strategies Unlimited states, “Light per LED package has doubled in the past two years, while cost has gone down 10 percent or so, so we’re getting more than twice the lumens per dollar. It’s not a stretch to see 10× more light output within five years, for a 10× decrease in cost.”

The LED market jumped 60 percent  in 2007 to $330M, according to Strategies Unlimited, which projects a $1.4B

Makers of solid-state lighting have improved light output markedly over the past two years, particularly for cool white light. (Source: Strategies Unlimited)

Cree LED Lighting Solutions is growing rapidly, powered by sales of its recessed downlight fixture that claims to put out the equivalent of a 65W incandescent bulb while using only 12W. CTO Gerry Negley, however, sees more need for progress in manufacturing technology.

“We haven’t found the right chip or package yet,” Negley said. “The LED community is just starting to understand what the lighting community needs.” He sees the key issues as developing better drivers to convert down to the low 3V level needed for the LEDs and better encapsulants that don’t optically degrade in light and heat. “With most materials, we know how they behave with temperature, but we don’t know how they behave with light,” he said, noting that the LED operating conditions are far more severe than those for photovoltaics. “It’s a question of finding the right polymer engineers and making them understand the problem.”

LED yields remain a problem, noted Steele, as the chips vary by wavelength, light output and voltage, and then they’re topped with a squirt of phosphor in epoxy that adds even more variability, leaving a lot of chips that don’t meet standards on one of the three measures.