On January 8th ,2016, the National Science and Technology Award Conference was held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and the "Silicon Substrate high luminous efficiency Gallium Nitride(GaN)-based Blue Light-emitting Diode Project" jointly conductedby Nanchang University, LatticePower (Jiangxi) Co., Ltd. and LatticeLighting Co., Ltd. won the top prize of 2015 national technology invention.

The production of GaN based LEDs on silicon substrates has long been a dream of the industry. However, due to the huge lattice mismatch and thermal mismatch of silicon and gallium nitride, the epitaxial film cracking, and low light efficiency caused by the poor crystal qualityhave not been solved for a long time.

The team started their research in 2003 and made their first prototype in 2005，then commercialized the technology by founding LatticePower in 2006. The company is "an early adopter of this technology and commenced volume production of GaN-on-Si LED chips in June 2012", according to Manufacturing Roadmap: Solid-State Lighting Research and Development, a report by the US Department of Energy in 2014.

GaN-on-Silicon LED technology has five major advantages: (1) IP protection from EPI to chips, from packaging to applications; (2) excellent performance including better heat dissipation, better ESD property, longer lifetime, higher current density; (3) simplified packaging process and lower cost with vertical electrodes structure; (4) larger wafer size for more efficient EPI and chip process, increasing throughput and lowering cost; (5) its single-side emitter design easily to match secondary optics, particularly suitable for high-quality directional lighting applications.

The research team has filed more than 330 patent applications for the technology ,and a GaN-on-silicon LED industry consortium has been formed in China, including 12 companies with plan to generate about 10 billion yuan in annual revenue in the next three years.