News: Suppliers
4 December 2020
AXT completes ramp of Osram shipments from Dingxing
AXT Inc of Fremont, CA, USA – which makes gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP) and germanium (Ge) substrates and raw materials – has completed the ramp of its gallium arsenide substrate shipments for its major customer Osram from its new manufacturing facility in Dingxing, China. In March, Germany-based Osram finished its qualification of the new facility and began accepting a portion of its order volume from Dingxing, which it has continued to ramp throughout the year.
“We are very pleased to be able to fully support Osram’s requirements from our new, world-class manufacturing facility in Dingxing,” says CEO Morris Young. “The facility was designed from the ground up around modern manufacturing best practices, utilizing state-of-the-art equipment and improved automation. It is also designed to efficiently scale to significant capacity expansion requirements, as our customers push the forefront of new, exciting, high-volume applications for gallium arsenide substrates” he adds. “We have greatly valued Osram’s partnership through the process of our relocation and we are excited to be able to support its growth across a breadth of established and emerging photonics fields.”
Dingxing is about 75 miles from Beijing. AXT began offering wafers from its new facility for customer qualification in 2019, and began customer site qualifications later that year.
The relocation process was prompted by the Beijing city government in 2015 selecting Tongzhou for its new municipal headquarters. AXT had been manufacturing its GaAs substrate wafers in the Tongzhou district of Beijing since 2000. Along with many other businesses asked to relocate their manufacturing lines in order to create room and upgrade the district, AXT was instructed to relocate its GaAs manufacturing line. Hence, during fourth-quarter 2019, it transferred its GaAs crystal growth ingot production to its new manufacturing facility in Kazuo (a city about 250 miles from Beijing) and its wafer processing for GaAs was relocated to its new plant in Dingxing. AXT began offering wafers from Dingxing for customer qualification in 2019, and began customer site qualifications later that year.
AXT GaAs substrate customer qualifies new wafer processing facilities
