Magic win at Elektra Award

Plessey’s MAGIC (MAnufactured on GaN ICs) High Brightness LED (HBLED) products have won the Solid-State Lighting Application Category of the Elektra Awards 2012. The winners were revealed last week at the European Electronics Industry Awards ceremony in London.

Barry Dennington, Plessey’s COO, said, "LEDs are the next key phase of the drive to reduce carbon usage, but widespread adoption has been held back by the high product costs and the low level of the light output. Our MAGIC technology solves both these problems, opening the way for LED lighting to become widespread and help cut energy bills. We have invested millions of pounds in our MAGIC manufacturing lines in Plymouth that are ramping up to volume production this year."

MAGIC HBLEDs are manufactured using industry-standard silicon foundries at what is claimed to be a much lower cost than current LED technologies based on sapphire or silicon carbide. Plessey’s technology uses gallium nitride (GaN) on 6″ silicon substrates. It requires a much thinner GaN layer at only 2.5 µm compared to 6 to 8 µm in other GaN on Si technologies. This means less deposition time so that Plessey can do multiple production cycles in 24 hours to achieve higher throughputs and lower costs.