GaN-on-Si Microwave and mm-Wave Devices

Abstract

During the last two decades, gallium nitride (GaN) based materials have emerged and demonstrated strong competitiveness in the fields of RF applications. Benefitted from the unique material properties such as wide-band gap, high critical electrical field, strong spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization, and high saturation velocity etc., GaN microwave and mm-wave transistors exhibit excellent performance including high output power, high efficiency, high temperature operation ability etc.. GaN grown a Si substrate, so called GaN-on-Si, holds the combination of the advantages from GaN and the Si substrate such as low cost, large wafer availability, and mass-production possibility using the mature Si foundries. In this talk we would like to give a brief overview on our progress of the research and development of GaN-on-Si microwave and mm-wave devices, including GaN-on-Si high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs), monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) for high-voltage power amplifier (PA) applications, low noise amplifier (LNA) applications, and low-voltage mobile SoC applications. The efforts to realize CMOS-compatible fabrication for GaN devices and GaN RF-Si CMOS heterogeneous integration will also be introduced. Finally, the future opportunities of GaN-on-Si device technologies and the relative challenges will be predicted.