Gallium-Oxide Pilot-Fab Scale-Up Leader — Grid Conversion

The mandate

The manufacturing founder stepped aside after vertical and lateral gallium-oxide prototypes showed substrate-linked breakdown tails, unstable ohmic contacts and thermal crowding that varied across university and pilot-fab flows. The team continues announcing peak voltage results from selected devices while wafer yield and repeatability remain too weak for application sampling. The interim leader must convert frontier-device learning into disciplined pilot manufacture without overstating readiness for grid deployment.

Eighteen months provide the scale-up window. The first two months secure recipes, wafers and measurement lineage and establish representative yield metrics. Months three through nine stabilise substrate, epitaxy, isolation, contact and passivation modules. Months ten through fifteen qualify pilot equipment, high-voltage test and reliability learning. The final three months appoint a permanent leader, transfer university interfaces and prove repeatable customer-sample delivery.

Handover is achieved when representative-device yield, breakdown distribution, contact resistance and thermal performance hold across three substrate lots and two complete pilot cycles, with reliability mechanisms stated honestly. The successor must chair a wafer-start decision, reject one nonrepresentative record result and defend the remaining technology gaps to investors. Selected dies and publication-only structures cannot substitute for declared product-intent populations.

The leader may stop pilot lots, approve recipes inside authorised structures, sequence scarce epitaxy and test tools, negotiate technical corrective actions and commit JPY 1.5 billion within the scale-up envelope. They decide readiness for controlled customer samples after reliability review. Product market claims, new commercial-fab capital, university intellectual property, financing terms and grid certification remain with the board and named executives.

Excluded are promising superiority over SiC or GaN, redesigning customer converters, owning fundamental crystal-growth research or presenting laboratory breakdown as commercial qualification. The mandate covers disciplined pilot operations and evidence for the selected gallium-oxide devices. Patent ownership, investor disclosure and contractual liability follow separate governance supported by the interim’s traceable results.

Why this seat is open

Ultra-wide-bandgap research can produce exceptional individual devices long before a stable manufacturing population exists. The founder transition created a gap between scientific ambition and the operational choices required for repeatable wafers. A temporary fab executive can preserve frontier learning while imposing sample, yield and reliability discipline that a permanent scale-up leader can inherit.

What you will own

• Establish genealogy for substrate origin, orientation, defect map, epitaxy, device process, contact metal, passivation and test condition.
• Convert record-device reporting into population distributions for leakage, breakdown, on-resistance, contact behaviour and thermal limits.
• Direct substrate and epitaxy learning around defect propagation, thickness, doping, surface preparation and wafer-scale uniformity.
• Stabilise isolation, etch, contact anneal, field management and passivation using mechanism-based splits and physical analysis.
• Build high-voltage test safety, calibration, destructive endpoints, sample preservation and cross-laboratory correlation.
• Sequence reliability work to distinguish contact, dielectric, surface, thermal and defect-driven degradation before extrapolating lifetime.
• Transfer qualified recipes, equipment gaps, university dependencies, product limitations and successor-led pilot-release evidence.

Candidate qualifications

• Led compound or ultra-wide-bandgap device technology from research wafers into disciplined pilot manufacturing.
• Can evidence a record device whose significance changed after full-wafer distribution and substrate genealogy were examined.
• Understands gallium-oxide materials, epitaxy, contacts, field management, thermal limitations and high-voltage characterisation.
• Has balanced university discovery with controlled recipes, equipment discipline, sample plans and investor communication.
• Governed high-voltage laboratories and destructive analysis around immature devices and scarce substrate material.
• Developed a successor able to protect scientific credibility while rejecting premature customer or market claims.

Non-negotiables

• Will lead onsite in Kyoto and attend every Osaka and Tsukuba materials and characterisation review.
• Has personally scaled an emerging compound-semiconductor process beyond selected research devices.
• Accepts no authority over investor claims, financing, grid certification, university patents or new commercial-fab capital.
• Will disclose substrate, epitaxy, equipment, university and competing power-semiconductor relationships before appointment.

1. 49 words maximum. Which record compound-semiconductor result weakened most when you examined the wafer population?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you separate substrate-driven breakdown from processing and measurement effects?
3. 49 words maximum. What must the successor prove before releasing gallium-oxide samples to customers?