Company - United Semiconductors
Product/Service
- Classification
- In-Space Manufacturing
- Category
- In-Space Manufacturing
- Fields
- Orbital Microfabrication
- Status
- Development, Launched
- First launch
- 2024
AFRL sponsorship recipient wins NASA space manufacturing contract, 2022-05-26.
- Air Force Research Laboratory research sponsorship recipient, United Semiconductors, LLC (USLLC), is one of eight companies selected to work on a three-year, $21 million NASA contract to manufacture tools in space.
- The key technological innovation of this work is to grow large diameter semiconductor crystals with high optical quality, which have use in several U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force systems of interest.
- Based on the unique properties their material demonstrated, NASA awarded United Semiconductors a contract to develop new technologies using the benefits of microgravity for in-space manufacturing of advanced materials. USLLC will grow semiconductor crystals used in electromagnetic sensors. Under microgravity conditions, the company hopes to produce larger crystals with significantly fewer defects. If successful, the crystals grown in space would produce usable wafers or thin slices of semiconductors used to build circuits.
- “The ternary semiconductor crystals that [AFRL] funded him to develop are incredibly challenging,” Schunemann said. “Numerous obstacles had to be overcome to achieve device-quality crystals, including severe segregation, compositional nonuniformity, constitutional supercooling, inclusions, voids, cracks and grain boundaries. The fact that he has been able to achieve reproducible crystals with high optical quality, uniformity and precise composition control, and scale these crystals to very large diameters, is nothing short of astounding!”
- Compared to State-of-the-art industrial furnaces operated under similar conditions and operating temperature, USLLC Space Furnaces are designed to consume 3-4x less power with 25% volume reduction and 20% weight reduction.
- Space crystal growth ampoule designs are significantly different than terrestrial crystal growth ampoules.
- The designs must account for Marangoni convections, absence of buoyancy and convection, vibration, and mechanical safety (for flight launches), ease for astronauts to handle and operate, precision designs to enable crystal growth using the thermal profiles in the space furnaces, leverage the micro-gravity conditions
- Leveraging Microgravity for Container Designs
- Weightlessness: Ultra-large Diameter Crystals
- Container-less Crystal Growth
- Marangoni Convection: Enhanced Mixing
- G-Jitters: Periodic Deposition
- Buoyancy: Spatial Alloy Dispersion
- Absence of Natural Convection: Controlled Diffusion
- Orientation of residual gravity: Nutrient Feeding
- Raw Material Form Factor for Space Crystal Growth: Tailored Nucleation.
- New crystal growth & wafer processing approaches and device designs needs to be developed for leveraging the full potential of In-Space manufacturing.
United Semiconductors Crystal Growth Payload Arrives at the ISS Onboard SpX-31, 2024-11-04.
- The first of its kind semiconductor crystal manufacturing experimental payload headed to the International Space Station (ISS) launched on the SpaceX-31 resupply mission
- In-Space manufacturing leveraging microgravity conditions has numerous technological potentials based on scientific research conducted over the past 5 decades. However, there remains many technical gaps for translating scientific success into large scale manufacturing efforts.
- Through a NASA funded In-Space Production Applications (InSPA) grant, supplemented by a National Science Foundation (NSF) SBIR funding, USLLC is addressing key challenges and feasibility of microgravity manufacturing. This will pave the path for long term development of critical tools and processes for high throughput production of semiconductor-based materials leveraging the beneficial effects of microgravity.
- The company plans to deploy crystals manufactured in space for potential use in next generation semiconductor technologies, including autonomous systems, sensing, artificial intelligence, aerospace, and defense components. The use of microgravity is expected to boost performance, yield and reliability of devices fabricated with space manufactured materials.
- USLLC’s SpX-31 payload is for production of a novel class of Semimetal-Semiconductor Composite Bulk Crystals. The investigation will be conducted in the NASA-owned Solidification Using a Baffle in Sealed Ampoules (SUBSA) furnace.
- Partners on this investigation include payload implementation partners, Redwire Space Technologies, Inc. and CSS, Inc., Axiom Space and third-party validation partner, AFRL’s Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB). The learnings generated from this project will lay the groundwork for the development of an in-space manufacturing platform for semiconductors.
- “This mission is focused on microgravity enabled semiconductor manufacturing and will leapfrog prior science investigations in the SUBSA furnace to a commercial scale process development on ISS”. USLLC is leveraging its two decades of proven track-record in terrestrial III-V compound semiconductor alloy bulk crystal production and component designs for its microgravity materials development.
Status Comment / Notes
United Semiconductors Crystal Growth Payload Arrives at the ISS Onboard SpX-31, 2024-11-08.
Active NASA contract on in-space manufacturing at least until 2025.
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