Company information

Optogan group of companies is a vertically integrated producer of High Brightness LEDs based in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. The group is also active in Finland and Germany. Founded in 2004 by 3 graduates of Ioffe Phisico-Technical university  it is currently owned by various private and government investment funds.

History

OptoGaN Oy was founded in 2004 in Espoo, Finland by Dr. Maxim Odnoblyudov, Dr. Vladislav Bougrov and Dr. Alexey Kovsh, all graduates of the chair of Nobel Prize laureate Zhores Alferov. It has received several rounds of financing from various European VC investment funds. After the initial technology development stage the company R&D and pilot production line were expanded to MST Factory site in Dortmund, Germany. After 5 years of technology development stage in 2008 the company was acquired by a strategic investor – Russian private equity group Onexim. In 2009 Russian government investment funds Rusnano and RIK have joined Onexim group as investors to develop a full scale production facility for HB LEDs in Strelna Free-Economic zone near St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.

Shareholders

Onexim Group

Mikhail Prokhorov

Mikhail Dmitrievitch Prokhorov is a Russian billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the American basketball team, the New Jersey Nets. After graduating from the Moscow Finance Institute he made his name in the financial sector and went on to become one of Russia's leading industrialists in the...

 – 50% +1 share
OAO RIK – 33% -1 share
Rusnano

Russian Nanotechnology Corporation

Rusnano is a joint-stock company created and owned by the government of Russia and aimed at commercializing developments in nanotechnology...

  - 17%

Activities

Optogan is investing in further R&D of GaN technology and building an LED manufacturing facility capable of producing 1,5 billion HB LEDs/month near St.Petersburg in Russia.

Products

Optogan is marketing a range of products, which fall into four main categories: LED chips, packaged LEDs, LED Matrixes (standard light engines consisting of surface mounted LEDs) and Lumminaires.

Technology

OptoGaN company possesses the whole value chain of technologies in solid state lighting

Solid-state lighting

Solid-state lighting refers to a type of lighting that uses semiconductor light-emitting diodes , organic light-emitting diodes , or polymer light-emitting diodes as sources of illumination rather than electrical filaments, plasma , or gas.The term "solid state" refers commonly to light emitted...

 (SSL) necessary for the production of GaN based light emitting diodes

Light-emitting diode

A light-emitting diode is a semiconductor light source. LEDs are used as indicator lamps in many devices and are increasingly used for other lighting...

 (LEDs) and consumer-oriented SSL luminaries. The chain of technologies include

• epitaxial growth of high-quality semiconductor (GaN) wafers by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition
  Metalorganic vapour phase epitaxy
  Metalorganic vapour phase epitaxy , also known as organometallic vapour phase epitaxy or metalorganic chemical vapour deposition , is a chemical vapour deposition method of epitaxial growth of materials, especially compound semiconductors, from the surface reaction of organic compounds or...
  
    (MOCVD) technique;
• LED
  Light-emitting diode
  A light-emitting diode is a semiconductor light source. LEDs are used as indicator lamps in many devices and are increasingly used for other lighting...
  
   chip design and fabrication;
• LED packaging including phosphor
  Phosphor
  A phosphor, most generally, is a substance that exhibits the phenomenon of luminescence. Somewhat confusingly, this includes both phosphorescent materials, which show a slow decay in brightness , and fluorescent materials, where the emission decay takes place over tens of nanoseconds...
  
    coating for the conversion of the blue and ultraviolet radiation in visible white light spectrum, and lens molding;
• multichip LED mounting on printed circuit board with final assembling of various types of luminaries.

Massive breakthrough in GaN based LED technology started form pioneering works by S. Nakamura

Shuji Nakamura

is a professor at the Materials Department of the College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara .- Career :Nakamura graduated from the University of Tokushima in 1977 with a degree in electronic engineering, and obtained a master's degree in the same subject two years later, after...

 in early nineties of last century. OptoGaN technologies are characterized by improved quality of GaN wafers and patented LED epilayer structure with enhanced light generation capability, original f-PowerTM chip design enabling uniform electric current distribution in excess of 300 A/cm2, effectiveness of LEDs as high as 110 lm/W which is at the front level of World leading LED manufactures.
OptoGaN intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

(IP) and technologies are covered by 35 granted and pending patents, e.g. European Patent EP1903619B1 “Semiconductor heterostructure and light emitting diode comprising the semiconductor heterostructures” and Russian Patent No 2368030 “Semiconductor substrate, semiconductor device and method of manufacturing of a semiconductor substrate”.