Barry Dennington, Plessey’s COO, said, Plessey is committed to delivering innovative, disruptive technologies. We believe that MAGIC technology will enable us to drive the adoption of low power LED lighting forwards at a much greater pace as it enables HBLEDs to be manufactured in high volume using industry standard, silicon foundries at a much lower cost than current LED technologies based on sapphire or Silicon Carbide.
Plessey’s technology uses Gallium Nitride (GaN) on 6-inch silicon substrates which will be manufactured at the company’s Plymouth facility creating new high tech manufacturing jobs for the UK. It uses a much thinner GaN layer at only 2.5µm compared to 6 to 8µm in other GaN on Si technologies. This means less deposition time so that the company can do multiple production cycles in 24 hours to achieve higher throughputs and lower costs.
For the next generation products, Plessey intends to integrate its MAGIC HBLED products with its EPIC™ sensor technology to provide smart lighting solutions for even greater energy savings and carbon footprint reductions.