Dowa’s Nitride Semiconductor Plant Completes

Dowa Holdings announced on Thursday the firm completes construction of a new plant on February 2 at Dowa Semiconductor Akita, the subsidiary in Akita Prefecture, Japan, to produce nitride compound semiconductor. Dowa starts commercial production of aluminium nitride foundation layer and HEMT (high electron mobility transistor) epitaxial wafer. Dowa plans large equipment expansion for the products in fiscal 2007 starting April and expects more than 10 billion yen of sales for nitride compound epitaxal wafer in fiscal 2008.Dowa’s compound semiconductor products are highly pure gallium, gallium arsenide substrate by VGF (vertical gradient freezing) method used for semiconductor laser and GaAs based LED (light emitting diode) chip for IrDA (Infrared Data Association). The firm is the world top supplier of highly pure gallium. Nitride compound epitaxial wafer is added to the lineup.The new plant has 3,044 square meters of total floor space on 1,577 square meters of ground. The expenditure for the first-stage construction was about 1.6 billion yen with introduction of MOCVD (metalorganic chemical vapor deposition) furnace and evaluation equipment.