II-VI Incorporated, Wide Bandgap Materials Group, a commercial supplier of SiC substrates, has been awarded a $7.5M, cost-shared contract, over 3 years for scale-up of its Advanced Physical Vapor Transport (APVT) SiC crystal growth technology to produce 100-mm diameter substrates. This contract was awarded through the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and consists of $6.0M in funding from AFRL, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) (through Penn State ARL, Electro-Optics Center), along with $1.5M in II-VI cost share. The effort is focused on development and manufacturing producibility of high-quality, large-diameter (100 mm), semi-insulating (SI) SiC substrates. This program will address technical and manufacturing issues required for advanced wide bandgap semiconductor devices for both next generation Department of Defense (DoD) systems and commercial applications.

This work will be based on further development and manufacturing scale-up of II-VI’s advanced SiC substrate production process, providing high-quality, semi-insulating material for DoD requirements at significantly lower cost. Systems based on this material will operate with higher power efficiency and greater power-bandwidth RF performance and require less supporting infrastructure than existing systems. Militarily significant performance benefits as well as size weight and cost reductions at the system level are anticipated. Initial DoD applications for devices fabricated on these substrates are targeted at advanced, high-power radar systems.

This contract follows upon several years of II-VI’s successful development work in other DoD funded contracts. Those contracts focused on the fundamental aspects of SiC crystal growth and fabrication technology, along with large-scale substrate manufacturing development. Funding has been provided by the DoD’s Title III Office, AFRL, ONR, MDA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

“In order to fully realize future manufacturing cost savings, next generation device development will rely to a very large extent on 100-mm substrates. Currently such substrates are not commercially available and suffer from inadequate quality,” commented Dr. Andy Souzis, Technology and Program Manager for the Wide Bandgap Materials Group. "The cost-sharing nature of this program reflects II-VI’s ongoing commitment to SiC development by the addition of significant IR&D funding in addition to government support,” added Dr. Souzis.

About the II-VI Incorporated, Wide Bandgap Materials Group
The Wide Bandgap Materials (WBG) Division of II-VI Incorporated’s (NASDAQ: IIVI) Compound Semiconductor Group has the strategic goal to become the leading volume supplier of affordable, high-performance wide bandgap semiconductor materials. This group currently manufactures and markets high-quality single-crystal silicon carbide substrates for use in the wireless infrastructure, RF electronics, power switching, and solid-state lighting industries. The group enjoys a large and worldwide customer base and has two facilities located in Pine Brook, NJ, and Saxonburg, PA. Visit the WBG web site at http://www.iiviwbg.com/ and the II-VI Incorporated web site at http://www.ii-vi.com/.