GT Advanced Technologies, announced that it was ready to commercialize its new ASF165 sapphire growth furnaces, with high quality commercial volume production ready to go by the third quarter of this year — just in time for the iPhone 6, which is expected to have a sapphire display. These furnaces give the GTAT and Apple a huge edge in sapphire production; no other manufacturer or device maker is expected to have a large supply of cheap sapphire glass for the foreseeable future.
GTAT’s furnaces are where the boules — large blobs/balls — of single-crystal sapphire are grown, using a process that we covered in detail last year. Buried in GTAT’s announcement was another nugget of data that tips Apple’s hand and exposes how the company plans to control the sapphire glass market in the future: ”The company indicated that it has developed more advanced ASF technology capable of producing boules significantly greater than 165 kg. The company intends to keep this more advanced ASF system captive for some extended period of time.
Boule Boule
When manufacturers talk about boules — whether they’re boules of pure silicon or sapphire — they’ll typically refer to them by weight or, less frequently, by diameter. Both are important. Larger wafers, cut from larger boules, have less waste (as a percentage of total wafer area) than smaller ones, which is one reason why Intel and TSMC were pushing for the move to 450mm silicon wafers. GT Advanced Technologies can already produce a boule that’s up to 15 inches (380mm) in diameter (the final cut wafers are significantly smaller), but we know the company was sampling eight-inch cores back in 2011.
Pushing forward to 200-kilo (440lb) boules or beyond means that the company is aggressively ramping up its total volume capacity — and that’s a key factor in making sapphire glass cheap enough to integrate it into a smartphone display. But don’t miss the impact of that last sentence — GTAT is planning to hold these newer, higher capacity systems captive for “some extended period of time.
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