Australia’s BluGlass strikes agreement with Phillips’ LED unit

Australian clean technology company BluGlass says it has signed a major “collaboration agreement” with the LED unit of electronics giant Philipps Lighting that it says could be a key to bringing its unique semi-conductor technology to commercial deployment.

BluGlass is working on a “breakthrough” semiconductor technology called remote plasma chemical vapour deposition (RPCVD), which are used to “grow” semi-conductor materials for use in high-efficiency devices such as LEDs and power electronics and concentrated solar cells.

BluGlass says its low temperature technology should allow for LEDs to increase their efficiency and cut the cost of production. The LED market is expected to grow to more than $200 billion within the next decade.

BluGlass has been working on commercialising this technology for more than a decade, building upon 15 years of previous research at Macquarie University.

Managing director Giles Bourne says the agreement with Lumileds could help take the technology “all the way from R&D in the laboratory” to “specific applications” where the company can demonstrate performance advantages in real life commercial situations.

“Ultimately, this is helping us along the road to achieve commercialisation of the technology,” Bourne says.

BluGlass says RPCVD has several potential advantages over current manufacturing techniques, including higher performing devices and a cleaner, lower temperature and lower cost method of manufacture.

The idea of the “collaboration” agreement – which will last 6 to 12 months – is to explore commercialisation paths with Lumileds.

BluGlass described Lumileds as one of the industry leading LED companies and said it approached BluGlass in the latter part of 2015, when they commenced a review of the RPCVD technology. This review has led to the formal and exclusive collaboration agreement announced late last week.

“The significance of this is manifold for BluGlass, we now have the world leading equipment company Veeco and Lumileds, an industry leading device company, working with us during our industry acceptance phase,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

“We anticipate that if the project proceeds well with Lumileds that we will enter commercialisation discussions that could involve integrating RPCVD directly into the Lumileds manufacturing line.”