
2022 Business Start-Up Award winner: Porotech
Porotech receives a Business Start-Up Award for the development of porous semiconductors enabling the world’s first commercial native indium-gallium-nitride red light-emitting diode (LED) epiwafer – simplifying full-colour micro-LED display manufacture and advancing this next-generation technology towards widespread adoption.
Porotech's proprietary engineered subsurface porous semiconductor technology is enabling new optoelectronic products for the global display industry. The technology is based on a commercially scalable electrochemical etch process enabling precise formation of subsurface porosity within gallium nitride alloys. Through careful design of structures and control of the fabrication method, high quality semiconductor wafers are produced that can be supplied to the global semiconductor manufacturing supply chain ready for mass production.
The technology enables features not previously accessible within this material. Most notably, the porosification reduces strain in the lattice enabling a higher fraction of indium to be incorporated in indium gallium nitride light-emitting diodes (InGaN LEDs), resulting in longer wavelength emission. This has resulted in the world’s first commercial native InGaN red LED epiwafer for micro-LED display applications.
This world first creates the possibility for red, green and blue emitters on the same InGaN material system for the first time. Conventionally, mixed aluminium indium gallium phosphide (AlInGaP) and InGaN LEDs were required to create full-colour displays. Mixing material systems presents major manufacturing hurdles to the display industry in creating micro-LED displays, severely limiting the potential for the mass market adoption of this next-generation technology.
Porotech’s full-colour micro-LED platform solves these major hurdles and provides a feature-rich platform for customers to develop compact and high efficiency micro-LED displays. The technology has gained significant interest from some of the biggest global names in display technology and consumer electronics.
The management team behind Porotech include world experts in the field of gallium nitride-based devices and individuals with strong track records in the semiconductor industry. Together, the team is ensuring the company is well funded and on track to deliver world-class products to the industry. The company has received significant private funding enabling expansion and rapid technological progress.
About the company
Porotech develops and delivers engineered porous gallium nitride (GaN) with material properties tailored to wide-ranging applications. Porotech’s team of physicists, innovators and industry experts believe these new technology platforms can unleash the full potential of GaN to change the semiconductor industry in many emerging markets including micro-LED displays and quantum light sources.