News: Suppliers
13 December 2024
AIXTRON Innovation Center opened by North Rhine-Westphalia’s Minister for Economic Affairs
After beginning construction in November 2023, the new €100m Innovation Center of deposition equipment maker Aixtron SE in Herzogenrath, near Aachen, Germany has been opened by Mona Neubaur, Minister for Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy & Deputy Prime Minister of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The official ceremony was attended by representatives from politics, the city of Herzogenrath, and the Aachen Chamber of Industry and Commerce.
Picture: From left to right: Dr Benjamin Fadavian, Dr Felix Grawert, Mona Neubaur, and Dr Christian Danninger. (Photo: AIXTRON/Friedrich Stark.)
Neubaur visited AIXTRON as part of an innovation tour in North Rhine-Westphalia. President & chief executive officer Dr Felix Grawert and chief financial officer Dr Christian Danninger showed the minister the new R&D complex, which has 1000m2 of cleanroom space.
The Innovation Center building is designed for the transition to 300mm-diameter wafers for gallium nitride (GaN) and other compound semiconductor applications. “The launch of 300mm wafer technology is a milestone for the energy efficiency and competitiveness of our region,” stated Neubaur. “Our global competitiveness benefits enormously from robust domestic semiconductor production, because semiconductors are essential for the transformation towards climate neutrality,” she added.
Due to GaN’s advantageous material properties in power electronics applications, GaN-based devices can increase the efficiency of chargers in consumer electronics, enable efficient power conversion in renewable energy, and provide energy-efficient power supplies for servers and data centers. This also helps with burgeoning artificial intelligence applications, which require large amounts of energy.
This demand is driving AIXTRON’s development of 300mm deposition technology, as the larger wafer size enables a productivity gain of 2.25 times more wafer area compared with incumbent 200mm wafers. Also, customers can use their 300mm fabs and processing equipment for the first time for compound semiconductor applications, making make GaN device production not only more cost-effective but also offering opportunities for technology performance gains in the future.
“With 300mm wafer technology, we are bringing compound semiconductor for the first time into the mainstream of semiconductor fabrication,” says professor Michael Heuken, VP Advanced Technologies at AIXTRON. “The Innovation Center is a major element of our strategy, providing space and capabilities for next-generation technologies. The step towards 300mm in compound semiconductor is a landmark milestone, that is set to trigger numerous growth options for the industry in the years to come,” he adds.
“We already have the first 300mm GaN prototype systems, which have also been integrated into pilot lines at several customers,” notes Grawert. “For decades, we have been working on technological solutions even when the market had not yet defined its requirements in concrete terms. This enables us to help our customers with their product developments at an early stage and to offer innovative technologies that are market-ready at precisely the moment when demand first arises.”
