Sapphire substrate manufacturing for LED market dominance

New Hampshire company growing million-dollar boules of aluminum oxide for LED substrates, sold to Chinese buyers. Used to set up the externalities-and-technology-transfer argument.

The company that grows this aluminum oxide, or builds the equipment for it, is up here in New Hampshire. The equipment is about a quarter the size of this room and about as tall as this room. The melting temperature of aluminum oxide is about 2,000 centigrade, so it gets pretty hot.

New Hampshire company growing sapphire boules sold furnace technology to China on a ~$300M order; China now owns the LED substrate market.

First of all, there are not a lot of choices. I didn't have an Ashby plot back in nineteen eighty-two whenever they asked me this question, but I knew the properties of materials, and I knew my choices were diamond — and I didn't know where I could get a nice long slender diamond like that, but it would be a great tool. Might be pricey, but this is a medical instrument, so you can charge a lot for it. Silicon carbide — I didn't know how I could get any reasonable cost silicon carbide. But if you look at the top there's alumina. What's another name for aluminum oxide? Sapphire. [Tom passes a sapphire boule fragment around.] This type of piece of sapphire was not single crystal. It's grown in a boule that was about the size of a great big beach ball. It took about a month to grow it in the furnace. You put the aluminum oxide powder in, take it up to the melting point which is above 2,000 degrees centigrade — somewhere between 2000, 2100 centigrade for pure alumina — and you cool it down very slowly over about three weeks before you'd open up the chamber.