Development of GaN process on silicon substrate for millimetre wave applications – SATELLITE

Gallium nitride based High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) offer the unique possibility to design and fabricate microwave power devices giving outstanding performance at high frequency because the microwave power density is several order of magnitude higher than those obtained on GaAs or InP based devices. Up to now, most of the state of the art results, published in the literature, are obtained on devices made on epitaxies grown on SiC substrate. Recently, a single-chip power amplifier with a 3-stage common source scheme delivered an output power of 1.3W (31.13 dBm) at 75 GHz with a CW source module. This result demonstrates tremendous superiority of GaN device technology for power applications at high frequency.
Furthermore, the capabilities of both AlGaN/GaN and InAlN/GaN HEMTs on silicon substrate for millimeter-wave applications, in term of cutoff frequencies and microwave power, were also demonstrated. In this context, the goal of this project consists to demonstrate high microwave power density in millimeter wave range and to fabricate a MMIC (Millimeter Monolithic Intergrated Circuit) delivering a microwave power of 4 W at 40 GHz. In this project, the different bricks necessary for the development and the future industrialization of low cost MMICs working in the 40.5-43.5 GHz frequency range demonstrating high power and good linearity will be analyzed and optimized.
IEMN is the leader of this project in association with another academic laboratory: CRHEA for the material growth and three industrial partners: OMMIC, VECTRAWAVE and BLUWAN having a complementary knowhow. The project is based on the technology developed on silicon substrate for low cost applications where both AlGaN/GaN and InAlN/GaN epitaxies will be investigated using MOCVD growth. Up to now, this research domain was never investigated elsewhere and in the competitive gallium nitride field, there is no commercialized product. So, this project is clearly innovative and ambitious. In order to have the maximum chance of success, the study is based on a complete chain from the material growth to the demonstrator associated with different necessary activities such as physical characterization, physical simulation of electron transport in material and heterostructures, electrical and microwave characterization, AlGaN/GaN and InAlN/GaN HEMTs process development, physical simulation of HEMTs, performance evaluation and characterization of the transistor, reliability tests on the transistor, non linear model extraction of components, design and fabrication of circuits. The project duration is 42 months.