News

24 November 2009

 

HRL orders Aixtron CCS MOCVD reactor to boost GaN HEMT capabilities

Deposition equipment maker Aixtron AG of Herzogenrath, Germany says that in third-quarter 2009 it received an order for a Close Coupled Showerhead (CCS) 6x2-inch MOCVD reactor for delivery in first-quarter 2010 to HRL Laboratories LLC of Malibu, CA, USA (a corporate R&D lab owned by The Boeing Company and General Motors).

The system will be used to support HRL’s work on gallium nitride technologies, including the growth of GaN high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) for millimeter-wave power applications and high-voltage GaN transistors for high-efficiency power switching applications.

“Among the practical aspects which suit our applications are not only the low carrier gas consumption and overall efficient materials utilization but also the ease of maintenance,” comments an HRL research staff member working on GaN. “The CCS system has a proven track record thanks to the large number of systems installed worldwide, and we will appreciate the good scale-up potential that enables an easy recipe transfer to a large system,” he adds. “The Aixtron system will provide a major augmentation to our GaN material growth capabilities... It will enable fabrication of more sophisticated GaN HEMT structures as well as addressing our need for higher process throughput.”

Among HRL’s reported successes in millimeter-wave GaN-based monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) is 500mW of output power at 95GHz for a GaN MMIC, as presented at the 2008 IEEE Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium (CSIC) in Monterey, CA.

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