Interim financial report for the half year ended 31 December 2016
Achieves Key Commercialisation Milestones for the First Half of 2017
Sydney, Feb 13, 2017 AEST (ABN Newswire) - BluGlass Limited (
ASX:BLG) (BUGLF:OTCMKTS) principal activity during the half year was the further development and commercialisation of novel technology for the manufacture of epitaxially grown gallium nitride at low temperature. BluGlass is also engaged in research activities in developing other high efficiency nitride devices.
All research and development activites are conducted in BluGlass Limited. There were no other significant changes in the nature of the consolidated entity's principal activities during the half year.
REVIEW OF OPERATIONS
The first half of the 2017 Financial Year has seen BluGlass achieve a number of key technical and commercial milestones that have brought the company closer to its commercialisation goals:
Half Year Highlights:
- In September 2016, BluGlass announced that it had commissioned its upgraded RPCVD chamber (the smaller of BluGlass' two RPCVD systems) designed to help address the scalability and uniformity of RPCVD that is required for commercial demonstrations. The upgraded chamber was designed to build on and improve on past performance data as well as create a platform RPCVD design that can be easily scaled to larger deposition areas. Subsequent to this, at the BluGlass AGM in November, we were able to show good initial thickness uniformity improvement demonstrated by this new deposition chamber. Since the AGM, BluGlass has made further improvements with the thickness uniformity to a level that satisfy our requirements for industry demonstrations for 2" wafers.
- In October 2016, BluGlass was pleased to announce that it has successfully completed the technology demonstration outlined in Phase I of its Exclusive Evaluation Agreement with industry leading LED company, Lumileds.
This required BluGlass to successfully deliver a number of technical milestones of Phase I of the Lumileds exclusive evaluation. The successful demonstration of these milestones has broken exciting new ground for the RPCVD technology development.
The two companies are now collaborating on Phase II of the evaluation, where Lumileds will further investigate the integration of BluGlass' RPCVD technology in Lumileds LED applications.
- Also in October, BluGlass raised $5m in an institutional placement to support the Companies three existing evaluation and collaboration agreements, and to enable BluGlass to explore additional strategic industry discussions and opportunities.
- Following the BluGlass 2016 AGM in November, BluGlass' Chairman, George Venardos retired from the company's Board after serving as Chairman for the previous six years and prior to this, as a Non-Executive Director since December 2008.
The Board appointed Dr. William Johnson to replace Mr. Venardos as Chairman. Dr. Johnson was previously a Non-Executive Director and was appointed to the Board in September 2010.
Dr. Johnson is a seasoned CEO and Director with extensive business development, M&A, IP commercialisation and successful hands-on leadership roles in operations ranging from high technology start-ups, to Fortune 500 high technology companies. He was the former President and Chief Executive Officer of SPTS Technologies, a manufacturer of capital equipment for the semiconductor and related industries.
- In November, the Company announced that it has received a significant order commitment from a new customer for ~$600,000 of specialist epitaxy (foundry) development. This order is scheduled to be delivered over a 12-month period.
This UK based customer is developing gallium nitride (GaN) technology targeting LED and other applications. BluGlass having fulfilled a small order for this customer have secured this $600K order commitment, which will be developing a new innovative project.
BluGlass has placed additional emphasis on growing its Foundry Customer business in Financial Year 2017. The foundry business continues to introduce BluGlass to new and emerging applications including novel LED, micro-LED, laser diode and power electronic applications.
BluGlass selects foundry customers at the cutting edge of innovation, with the potential to become the future of the nitrides industry, especially those that could benefit from a market enabling low temperature RPCVD technology.
- In November, BluGlass announced that it has entered into a formal Collaboration Agreement with IQE (AIM:IQE), one of the world's leading semiconductor foundries and a global leader in the design and manufacture of advanced semiconductor wafer products.
IQE products are used by major global chip companies to produce high performance components that enable a wide range of high-tech applications including for the wireless industry, such as smartphone and wireless infrastructure, Wi-Fi, base stations, GPS, and satellite communications; optical communications and optical storage.
BluGlass and IQE are collaborating to develop specific enabling technology for high quality nitride films deposited by Remote Plasma Chemical Vapour Deposition (RPCVD) on both silicon wafers and on specially engineered substrates; cREO(TM) on silicon.
At the time of the announcement, IQE Group's Vice President, Dr. Rodney Pelzel said "We are extremely pleased to announce our collaboration with BluGlass. BluGlass' world leading RPCVD technology is highly complementary to IQE's existing technology portfolio, and the collaboration is a key step in overcoming challenges inherent to epi-growth of cutting edge materials. This arrangement marks another key milestone for IQE as it continues to provide market leading solutions to its customers."
BluGlass is delighted to have formed a strategic partnership with IQE, who we have chosen to work with based on the enormous market potential and impact that the applications that we will be co-developing could have on the semiconductor industry in the future.
- In December 2016, BluGlass completed its Share Purchase Plan which raised $3.1m. This combined with the October $5m Institutional Placement has put BluGlass in a strong financial position to execute its commercialisation plans.
The Half Year Ahead:
The BLG-180 chamber has demonstrated improvement in thickness uniformity and based on this design, the new and larger chamber for the BLG-300 was built to improve uniformity and address scaling of the RPCVD technology. The new chamber has recently arrived at BluGlass and is being prepared for installation.
The BluGlass technology team are finalising the plans for its installation onto the larger RPCVD system, to ensure minimal disruption to BluGlass' partner evaluations, in particular the Lumileds Phase II project. While BluGlass continues to make steady progress on the Phase II of the Lumileds project it is anticipated that the new BLG-300 chamber design will help with the technical performance for the Lumileds project beyond simply scaling aspects and we are assessing options for its implementation to assist with the Lumileds milestones and timelines. The BLG-300 scaling is critical for our other industry projects such as IQE, Veeco and HC Semitek to progress on commercial size wafers.
BluGlass continues to explore new strategic opportunities, including collaborations, partnerships and expanding the foundry business within the opto-electronic value chain.
As we head into the remaining half of the 2017 financial year, we continue to make progress towards delivering successful outcomes in our current industry partnerships. These discussions and collaborations are in different stages of development, but each one of them has large market potential once fully realised.
The BluGlass Board and Management looks forward to keeping you up to date over the coming months as we take our cutting edge technology to market.
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About Bluglass Limited
BluGlass Limited (ASX:BLG) (OTCMKTS:BUGLF) is an Australian green technology company formed to commercialise a breakthrough in the Semiconductor Industry. BluGlass has invented a new process using Remote Plasma Chemical Vapour Deposition (RPCVD) to grow semiconductor materials such as gallium nitride (GaN) and indium gallium nitride (InGaN), crucial to the production of high efficiency devices such as next generation lighting technology Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) with advanced performance and low cost potential. The RPCVD technology, because of its low temperature and highly flexible nature, offers many potential benefits over existing technologies including higher efficiency, lower cost, substrate flexibility including GaN on silicon and greater scalability.
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