In the LED industry, there is also a "Moore's law" similar to the integrated circuit field-Haitz's law, which mainly means that the price of LED will be reduced to 1/10 of the original every 10 years, and the performance will be increased by 20 times.
Due to the increase in the size of the LED sapphire substrate, the upstream production process and equipment level must be correspondingly improved. Therefore, overcoming process and technical difficulties will result in increased costs to a certain extent, but large-size crystals can produce scale effects and at the same time be in line with the existing semiconductor manufacturing processes, which ultimately leads to a reduction in overall costs. The evolution of the entire industry to large sizes will reduce production costs and ultimately expand the application range of sapphire.
In the entire industrial chain of sapphire manufacturing, the processing procedures and difficulties are relatively large, of which the crystal growth link is the most important, because it determines the quality of the final sapphire substrate. Generally speaking, the sapphire crystal growth method can be divided into three types: solution growth, melt growth, and vapor growth. The melt growth method has the characteristics of fast growth rate, high purity, and good crystal integrity. And the most commonly used crystal growth method for crystals of specific shapes. At present, the methods that can be used to artificially grow sapphire crystals by means of melt growth mainly include flame melting method, pulling method, zone melting method, guided mold method, crucible movement method, heat exchange method, temperature gradient method, and Kyrgyzstan method.
