7 June 2011

Cree ships 10 million Watts of commercial RF power transistors and high-power MMIC amplifiers

Cree Inc of Durham, NC, USA says that, as of April, its RF business unit has shipped commercial gallium nitride on silicon carbide (GaN-on-SiC) RF power transistor and monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) products with combined RF output power of more than 10 million Watts, demonstrating the consistency, reliability and proven performance of its GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) and MMIC technology. The figure includes only commercial RF products and excludes an additional 1.5 million Watts shipped for GaN MMIC foundry services.

Cree says that it attained the milestone while maintaining a return rate of less than 1 part per million and a failure-in-time rate (FIT rate) of less than 10-per-billion device hours (up to 80% lower than the typical FIT rates for other RF technologies, it is reckoned).

“We have achieved more than 1.4 billion total hours of field operation for our GaN-on-SiC devices, coupled with reliability that surpasses other high-voltage silicon or GaAs technologies,” says Jim Milligan, Cree’s director of RF. “This is the largest known body of fielded data accumulated by any domestic GaN supplier to date, and includes not only discrete transistors but complex multi-stage GaN MMICs as well,” he adds. “The 10 million Watt milestone is a testament to the rapid adoption of our GaN technology — not only for military applications, but for telecom base-stations, wide-band test equipment, civil radar and medical applications as well. If our expansion into these new market segments continues at the current rate, we have the potential to double the 10 million Watt milestone by the end of calendar 2011.” 

As the largest US producer of GaN-on-SiC RF wafer processing technology, Cree has developed a range of GaN HEMTs and MMICs designed to enable broadband, high-efficiency and reliable performance across an increasing array of RF and microwave applications.

Tags: Cree GaN RF power transistor GaN HEMT

Visit: www.cree.com