+44 (0)24 7671 8970
More publications     •     Advertise with us     •     Contact us
 
News Article

Freescale "solves" GaAs gate oxide problem

Chip giant Freescale says that its GaAs MOSFET will allow devices based on the compound semiconductor to be scaled just like silicon CMOS chips.

Freescale Semiconductor claims to have developed a commercially-viable GaAs MOSFET that can be scaled in much the same way as silicon CMOS devices.

If it does prove viable, the development could pave the way for a GaAs equivalent of Moore's Law, where the speed and size of transistors can be advanced rapidly through lithography and other standard processes.

The crucial breakthrough was the development of a viable gate oxide that is also compatible with GaAs, which has always proved an insurmountable stumbling block in the past.

Because of this gate oxide problem, the semiconductor industry has been unable to apply its standard processes, manufacturing equipment and interconnects to GaAs.

Although commercial deployment of GaAs MOSFETs may still be some way off, Freescale believes that the technology could lead to new classes of power amplifier and revolutionize analog-to-digital conversion technology.

"This remarkable achievement overturns industry assumptions," said Freescale acting CTO Sumit Sadana. "[It] has the potential to fundamentally change the way high-performance semiconductors are designed, manufactured and deployed."

How exactly Freescale has solved the gate oxide problem is being kept under wraps, but the company said that it had eliminated defects around the oxide-semiconductor interface that had hindered previous efforts.

However, Freescale has revealed some details of its GaAs MOSFET efforts in the past. At the 2004 International Conference on MBE, held in Edinburgh, Matthias Passlack from the company's Tempe, AZ, laboratories revealed a method for growing Ga2O3 from a polycrystalline source.

Working with Osemi, Passlack and colleagues first capped the GaAs epitaxial layers with a protective arsenic layer. They then used effusive evaporation to grow the Ga2O3 gate, before introducing an additional beam of the heavy metal gadolinium.

The Motorola spin-off says that it now plans to work in collaboration with other companies to create products that use the high-speed computing performance that GaAs MOSFETs would allow.

Back in 2001, Motorola announced to similar fanfare that it had developed GaAs-on-silicon wafers, which also promised to revolutionize microelectronics (see related story). Motorola even formed a spin-off company to exploit that technology, but the initial optimism proved groundless as problems with defects saw the hybrid approach shelved.

×
Search the news archive

To close this popup you can press escape or click the close icon.
×
Logo
×
Register - Step 1

You may choose to subscribe to the Compound Semiconductor Magazine, the Compound Semiconductor Newsletter, or both. You may also request additional information if required, before submitting your application.


Please subscribe me to:

 

You chose the industry type of "Other"

Please enter the industry that you work in:
Please enter the industry that you work in: