Boeing and General Labs have developed GaN CMOS field-effect transistors
HRL Labs, a research and development lab owned by Boeing and General Motors Corporation of the United States, has announced its first demonstration of Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (FET) FET technology. The study was published in the inieee eNewsletter on January 6, 2016.
In the process, the lab has determined that the superior transistor performance of semiconductors can be leveraged in integrated circuits. This breakthrough paves the way for gallium nitride to become an alternative technology for current power conversion circuits based on silicon.
GaN transistors have excellent performance in power switching and microwave / millimeter wave applications, but this potential has not been used for integrated power conversion. "Unless the fast-switching GaN power transistor is intentionally slowed down in the power supply circuit, the chip-to-chip parasitic inductance causes voltage instability," said Chu Rongming, principal investigator at HRL.
Chu and his colleagues at HRL Microelectronics labs overcome this limitation by developing GaN CMOS technology that integrates enhanced GaN NMOS and PMOS on the same silicon. Chu said that the power switch and driver integrated circuits on the same chip, is to reduce the final method of parasitic inductance.
Currently, gallium nitride transistors are designed as power converters for radar systems, cellular base stations, and notebook computer power adapters. "CMOS ICs can be applied to power ICs in the short term, enabling more efficient power management with smaller form factors, lower cost, and operating in harsh environments," Chu said. "In the long run, CMOS has the potential to replace silicon CMOS products extensively."
Chu concludes: "GaN gallium nitride (CMOS) integrated circuits were considered to be difficult or impossible due to the challenge of fabricating P-channel transistors and integrating N-channel transistors, but our recent work has opened the door to producing gallium nitride CMOS The possibility of integrated circuits. " (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Institute of Electronic Science and Technology Zhang Hui)
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