This new nitride compound semiconductor technology area has blossomed fast for microwave power amplifiers. The DOD has supported about 100 man years total, over a five-year period, at Cornell, to reach state-of-the-art results. These give about 10 times as much microwave output power per unit of transistor width as any previous semiconductor technology. We have a long history of making substantial advances with other compound semiconductor technology, so ONR chose us and UCSB to advance this technology. We needed to harness the strong electrical polarization effect in these materials, and abandon any doping previously used. We also had to invent a means of controlling the surface for stable results. DOD is now investing substantial funding in this area in industry, to get high yield, high performance devices and monolithic circuits ready for production. We at Cornell are cooperating with several industrial facilities, to transfer our technology to them. Our paper summarized the new level of high performance that these microwave, nitride-based transistors can reach, and how we design and fabricate them. These transistors are capable of eventually delivering up to 50 times the power that other transistors can deliver at a given microwave frequency.

Lester F. Eastman
John L. Given Foundation Chair
Professor of Engineering
Cornell University
Electrical and Computer Engineering
424 Phillips Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-5401