Plessey shortlisted for British Engineering Excellence Award

Barry Dennington, COO, Plessey Semiconductors, said, Following on from a range of awards for our EPIC products, this is the first nomination for Plessey's new range of MAGIC HBLEDs. The Plessey business model of bringing unique, disruptive technologies to the world market is working. We have a British semiconductor manufacturing facility which gives us the ability to create bespoke production capabilities for our products. We can, therefore, optimise and fine tune process technologies and products to rapidly bring new solutions to market. Plessey has a long history of developing high margin, unique and innovative products and we are actively working to add yet more to our portfolio.

The MAGIC technology will enable Plessey to offer LEDs that are significantly less expensive than existing LEDs as they are made on standard silicon substrates in a high volume, semiconductor production facility rather than the current, more expensive LEDs based on sapphire or Silicon Carbide.

Plessey's technology uses Gallium Nitride (GaN) on 6-inch silicon substrates which will be manufactured at the company's Plymouth facility creating new high tech manufacturing jobs for the UK. It uses a much thinner GaN layer at only 2.5µm compared to 6 to 8µm in other GaN on Si technologies. This means less deposition time so that the company can do multiple production cycles in 24 hours to achieve higher throughputs and lower costs.

For the next generation products, Plessey intends to integrate its MAGIC HBLED products with its EPIC™ sensor technology to provide smart lighting solutions for even greater energy savings and carbon footprint reductions.