Out of the niche at last!

"IQE is uniquely positioned in the ecosystem"

Avoiding the cycles

The key here, he said, is that IQE - like TSMC - does not depend on the success of individual customers, but rather supplies chipmakers worldwide, who in turn compete with each other and target a wide variety of markets with their different products. "We can grow with the overall market, and it will go mainstream very quickly, as indicated above," Lemos enthuses. "With our diversified customer base, we are less subject to cycles overall." He should know because as a former executive at companies such as Qualcomm, Intel, Texas Instruments, and, most recently, GlobalFoundries, he is intimately familiar with the industry that will give IQE the growth it seeks.

A cornerstone of his strategy is to forge partnerships with customers. These include foundries like GlobalFoundries as well as IDMs. "Especially the cooperation with GlobalFoundries in the field of RF products, which has been in place since 2021, is very important for us because we can leverage synergies together, and the feedback from GlobalFoundries gives us the significant impetus to improve our processes and technologies. Because GlobalFoundries' market knowledge also flows in, we can use it to significantly improve our roadmap."

Partnerships are the key

Where it wants to go in the future is demonstrated by its recently expanded partnership with Lumentum. Under the agreement, IQE will become the preferred supplier of epitaxial wafers, which are the basis for VCSEL manufacturing and are used in automotive LiDAR systems. Lumentum produces various optical components for 3D sensing, LiDAR, and optical networking. "The partnership with Lumentum is part of our strategy to strengthen customer relationships and enter into long-term contracts to secure wafer supply," Lemos said.

He had also achieved this in May this year with UK-based Porotech, a pioneer in microLED and GaN-based semiconductor technology. The focus of the partnership is to develop, scale, and commercialize Porotech's unique wafer technology with IQE providing GaN MOCVD (metal-organic chemical vapor deposition) capacity for this as an epi-wafer foundry. Ten of these systems operate at the Newport fab, and there would be room for 100. Both partners are now looking to build 200-mm wafer lines. According to Porotech, the "PoroGaN" platform can produce all visible wavelengths based on InGaN. This, it said, will enable the production of fully color-capable µLED and mini-LED displays for use in AR/VR glasses. That earned the company the Innovation Zone Award Best Prototype Category at this year's Display Week in San Jose in May for its "Dynamic Pixel Tuning" technology, reinforcing Lemos' optimistic view of this market sector: "µLEDs have the potential to shake up today's $140 billion display market in a big way."

IQE's goal is to establish more partnerships along these lines, thereby improving its technologies and further reducing the price of III-V substrates: "Such innovations will help µLEDs achieve a final breakthrough." 

This development will be accelerated by two additional developments, he added: first, the demands on component quality are increasing, so that pure silicon wafers are increasingly out of the question from the outset; second, the prices for silicon wafers have risen: "The price difference compared to compound semiconductors is already not that great, even though our task will continue to be to convince customers of the advantages of compound substrates over silicon."

For Lemos, the key now is to be able to translate IQE's good positioning into real business success: "To do this, we need to expand our global presence based on the good infrastructure we already have in place and develop the roadmap."

A very important aspect of this is to increase wafer sizes to increase productivity and make products cheaper. In the first place, it is not even crucial that more components fit on the larger wafers. Rather, it is only from a diameter of 200 mm that chip manufacturers have the complete range of the latest and most modern machines for semiconductor production at their disposal. "Only with their help do they have the chance to manufacture not only many more chips, but chips of very high quality," he said. "That's why we see our breakthrough in the production of VCSELs on 200-mm wafers as so crucial for the future," Lemos enthuses. Even the switch to 300-mm wafers at a later date is possible, he says and is already planned with Porotech. The MOCVD systems are already prepared for this.

But the 200-mm wafers already open up other interesting prospects: namely, combining production on Si wafers and composite wafers. "Then suddenly displays based on µLEDs and the driver circuits can be manufactured in parallel, which will open up further markets," says Lemos. No wonder IQE has therefore been working closely with the relevant equipment manufacturers for many years.

According to Americo Lemos, all of this shows that "IQE is uniquely positioned in the ecosystem to become vital to the entire electronics industry. Now it's a matter of execution."

Matchmaker+ Anbieter zum Thema

zu Matchmaker+

1. Out of the niche at last!
2. Will there soon be a compound semiconductor foundry in the UK?
3. "IQE is uniquely positioned in the ecosystem"