BluGlass Limited (ASX:BLG) Managing Director & CEO, Giles Bourne talks about the company's facilities upgrade and new RPCVD reactor at Silverwater, customer demonstrations and outlook for FY20.Jessica Amir: Thanks for tuning in to the Finance News Network. I'm Jessica Amir. Today I'm with BluGlass
(ASX:BLG) managing director, Giles Bourne. Giles, great to see you again.
Giles Bourne: Thanks for having me back.
Jessica Amir: First up Giles, you just successfully completed a facilities upgrade and commissioned your new RPCVD reactor. Just tell us what this all means for BluGlass.
Giles Bourne: Just to remind people. MOCVD is the technology that’s widely used now in the industry to make these devices like LEDs and the RPCVD technology that we’ve developed is a way of driving down the cost but also lifting the performance of the devices. And that’s why we are seeing increasing interest in the RPCVD technology. So it’s really important for us to actually provide the extra capacity a capacity and meet the demands for some of the customers in the foundry business, but more importantly some of the strategic opportunities we have for the RPCVD. So we spent a lot of this year building out the facility, putting all the infrastructure in place.
We've got two used MOCVD machine. One is a identical machine to the one we have already in our facility. Where we takethe learnings from that(machine) and make it better. And we have a larger scale tool call a G4. And we’ll be developing that later on in this year to come on. That deals with the scaling aspect of the technology.
Jessica Amir: And Giles you had a customer who successfully demonstrated your high-performance micro LEDs in their products and in their models. Just tell us about the customer and what this really means for BluGlass?
Giles Bourne: Micro LEDs have been really used for small displays initially, wearables for example or phones, AR VR. So where resolution is critical, form factor is critical as well and performance is critical. So we’ve been working with a number of customers in the foundry business. And we recently announced that we had actually delivered material, actually for the green and blue LEDs for a company called X-Celeprint.
They've just recently spun out a division called X-Display, and they're utilising our epitaxial products for that, showing RPCVD in a working prototype which is really exciting.
So their initial prototype is equivalent to the size of an iphone, that size of display. It’s really for the small displays, where you can get really good resolution out of it.
This company's based in North Carolina, they're getting a lot of attention from their technology, and we're an integral part of that prototype.
Jessica Amir: Giles, when we last caught up, you spoke about a breakthrough technology that you were working on, tunnel junctions. Just tell us how this is progressing.
Giles Bourne: Tunnel junctions and cascade LEDs have been talked about widely by the LED industry as a way of lifting performance without adding any extra cost to the LED. Performance I mean light output, and that's critical to the LED industry. We've been able to drive that as a technology, a demonstrator of something that's unique to RPCVD. We were fortunate enough to actually put out data earlier this year at a major industry conference, Photonics West, where we showed the actual foundation of a tunnel junction.
That was good enough data that the industry started engaging. It allowed us to go out and talk to the major LED producers and talk to them about how we could potentially use tunnel junctions and cascade LEDs in lifting performance.
Jessica Amir: Back to the facility now, you've got an open day coming up. What can we expect there?
Giles Bourne: We always liked to show what we're doing. We've got a world class facility in Silverwater. We do some very, very unique things out there. Great team of people, and of course, we've increased the size of our facility. We want to take the opportunity to open up our doors to investors, to the media, to politicians, to actually come and see what we're doing.
It’s something truly unique. So given that we've just commissioned this new reactor, and we've got this other reactor coming online, the facility is now all built, we're going to throw open the doors on the 26th of August, and actually allow people to interact with our team and interact with the board as well, see what we're doing, ask questions about technology and get an understanding of where we're going with it as well. We're going to publish more details about that open day, but for now, 26th of August is a date to remember.
Jessica Amir: Just lastly before we let you go, what can we expect for this financial year?
Giles Bourne: A lot our focus has been around tunnel junctions and cascade LED, and that still remains one of our core areas of focus, because we think there's a genuinely good opportunity there, not just for LEDs, but there's some other applications like laser diodes as well, which use the tunnel junction and cascade LEDs. We'll continue to drive that forward, work with the LED community, and the laser diode community, but also now we've got extra capacity. We want to build out our foundry business, so we've got lots of great customers there, we expect to bring on more customers, more strategic opportunities for the business as well.
For us, really, applying all the learnings we've made in RPCVD and actually taking it to the market, and that will be our focus for the year.
With all the development that we're doing or have been doing during the course of this year, of course there's more intellectual property that's been developed as well. We've filed a number of new patents and we expect these applications to go into fully granted patents during the course of the year. You can expect more news flow around our IP and further cementing our IP and building out our position there which is really critical that we have a broad coverage for RPCVD.
Lots of exciting things happening, not just only the facility, but with customers, with partners, and also with our IP as well.
Jessica Amir: Wonderful. Well, congratulations on all your success and looking forward to your opening day. Giles Bourne, thank you very much.
Giles Bourne: Thank you, Jess.
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