Sharp Attempts Rescue of HDTV with New Blue Lasers
In an effort to end the industry-wide shortage of blue laser diodes that occurred as a result of staggering underproduction by Sony and Nichia, the world's first two suppliers, Sharp Electronics today said it's ready to step up the mass production of diodes it's been making on a trial basis since just last month.
The move could relieve a beleaguered consumer electronics industry that saw Sony, the champion of the Blu-ray Disc format, allocate nearly all its capacity to its PlayStation 3, and yet still have only enough diodes on hand for perhaps a quarter-million units at the time the console launched last month.
Other manufacturers of both Blu-ray and HD DVD components have had to wait along with Sony as it works with technology partner Nichia to find a way to improve yields.
Meanwhile, Sharp had been busy in the laboratories for over a decade, and in its production facilities since at least 2002, to create an entirely new methodology for developing blue lasers that were more reliable and that had higher yields. That concept, called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), promises to yield higher quantities of components with lower power consumption and longer lifespan than blue lasers produced using the more conventional metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technique developed by Nichia.
Prior to the shortages, some observers wondered whether Sony would combat Sharp on intellectual property grounds, in Japanese and US courts, even though MBE and MOCVD are entirely different techniques.
With an entire segment of a burgeoning industry hanging on a key component which simply isn't available, it appears now that Sony and Nichia may graciously avoid a showdown, and let Sharp attempt its daring market rescue.
Sharp's move could mean that Sony's freshly re-supplied competitors could drop prices of high-def equipment next year in order to resuscitate consumer interest in high-def discs.
Up to now, Sharp spokesperson Hiroshi Takenami told the Nikkei financial press agency, its manufacturing arm has managed to ramp up blue laser production to 150,000 units per month. It's ready to accelerate that figure to 500,000 units monthly by next September, through the addition of a new dedicated manufacturing line at its Hiroshima plant.
Making blue lasers is a process of growing the right kind of crystal in a little climate-controlled garden. The MOCVD technique that Nichia perfected involves the use of a heated gallium nitride substrate. A warm nitrogen or hydrogen gas blows decomposing metal oxide molecules over the substrate, distributing them evenly. The decomposition irritates the substrate, which begins growing the crystals in response. This breaks up the metal oxide in turn, which then gets carried away by a mean crosswind blowing in a perpendicular direction.
As the process was first being developed, Nichia scientists had been working to reduce the dislocation density of the grown crystals - essentially, the number of ingrown fractures, which were several orders of magnitude greater than Nichia thought they needed to be: 10
But that decision was made in 2000, and since that time, manufacturing lines have looked for reasons why the yields are so low. The MBE process is about as different as hunting is from fishing. With Sharp's MBE, purified beams of molecules that emerge from an evaporation process are shot at a cleaned substrate using particle guns. As the molecules "splat," to use a phrase the scientists have avoided, onto the substrate, they form an epitaxial film from which the crystal grows, the direction and magnitude of growth having been "seeded" into the film through the gun as if through programming.
Though this is a far more complex process, dislocation density has been observed to be orders of magnitude lower. In fact, in what could have been an accidental discovery, the dislocation characteristics of the overgrowth of the substance - the stuff that grows so much that it spills over the substrate - has been found to have lower dislocation than the stuff attached directly to the substrate. As a result, scientists have developed intentional overgrowth processes in which the substrate is less bonded in places, like a flaky biscuit, enabling bigger pockets of overgrowth.
If the Sharp process works as anticipated, an industry that had been transfixed upon Nichia's achievements in growing epitaxial materials could change its focus to a new company entirely, shifting the balance of power just a bit, and in the process, perhaps diminishing Sony's exclusivity in the realm of Blu-ray.