Moosey - my take on this (Disclosure: I am a shareholder in...

Moosey - my take on this (Disclosure: I am a shareholder in Bluglass - BLG) is that BLG became an ASX company in 2006 which was far to early - it's major product is a low temperature method of epitaxial growth of Gallium Nitrite (GAN) which is an essential semiconductor material for high performance electronic, however silicon (Si) is used in filters and thus the IQE Front End Module (FEM) need to incorporate both GAN and Si in their FEM - the beauty of cREO is that it allow both materials to be incorporated on the same chip and provides a barrier between the two materials which stops the undesirable effect of mismatch between their crystal structures (i.e the parasitic channel). BLG's claim to fame is RPCVD (Remote Plasma compound vapour deposition) which was originally developed by Macquarie University in Sydney and then spun off as an ASX company in 2006 - this was far too early and they ran into serious difficulties with oxygen being a containment in their process which uses nitrogen plasma rather than ammonia to produce the GaN. The standard technology is MOCVD which uses ammonia. Problem with ammonia (and MOCVD) is the the process operates at about 1200C and since ammonia also has hydrogen (NH₃) the hydrogen "passivates" p- GaN (i.e it looses its semiconductor properties) and needs to be "annealed" to drive off the hydrogen. Annealing requires p-GaN is left a a high temperature for a period and that this p-GAN is NOT buried under other n-GAN. In practice this means that if you use MOCVD the top layer MUST be p-GAN and p-GAN cannot be buried below n-GAN (i.e you cannot stack p-GaN below n-GaN - the p-GaN has to be on top (i.e exposed so it can be annealed - allowing the hydrogen to escape and thus allowing the p-GaN to be activated). Since RPCVD uses hydrogen plasma the p-GaN is "active as grown" (i.e there is no hydrogen to escape) so if you use RPCVD you can bury the p-GaN and hence stack the GaN to produce things like stacked LED's (for high brightness) and high efficency laser diodes.

When BLG was spun off they hit a lot of unexpected problems (probably like GLE did with the Silex technology) but gradually resolved the problems but this cost a lot of money (about A$50m in many capital raisings) and delays from 2006 to now (14 years). Along the way BLG had many "collaborations" - (VEECO, IQE, Lumileds etc etc) - the objective was to licence the RPCVD technology to a major manufacturer - the "customers" objective was for BLG to spend money on development and see if they liked it once the development work was done. In the case of Lumileds BLG produced a stacked LED but were then almost flat on their back due having spent their money on development so at that time Lumileds demanded an "exclusive' deal since they knew that BLG desperately needed the money. Furthermore a major investor came to a really bad deal with a "finance house" which allowed the finance house to "short" BLG shares so their share price collapsed - BLG had to do yet another capital raising at a really knock down price (2c) to avoid the administrator and probable absorption by Lumileds to nothing. What has happened is that BLG did the knock down capital raising but changed tactics by committing to produce an innovative laser diode using RPCVD (which is probably what they are doing now with DARPA) and a plan to produce these laser diodes directly to market rather than using a major laser diode/LED manufacturer (i.e licencing RPCVD to major suppliers on a non-exclusive basis). The message is that to get a good deal you cannot be desperate and need a secondary source of funds to close a licensing deal. This mean that BLG's "collaboration" with IQE (and others) is on ice for the timebeing - the innovative laser diode is the priority since this will provide independent funds so they can survive a licensee saying "no' and wishing to force a deal that cannot be refused.