13 April 2012

Nitronex develops GaN RF transistor technology to pass toughest robustness tests

Nitronex Corp of Durham, NC, USA, which designs and makes gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) RF power transistors for the defense, communications, cable TV, and industrial & scientific markets, has developed a rugged transistor technology capable of surviving the industry’s most severe robustness tests without significant device degradation.

Based on this new technology, the XPT1015 is a 28V, DC-3.0GHz, 40W power transistor with 17.5dB small-signal gain and 65% peak drain efficiency at 2GHz. Its thermal resistance is 1.9°C/W, which is claimed to be amongst the lowest in the industry in this power class.

Designed from the ground up for ruggedness, the XPT1015 leverages Nitronex’s existing 28V NRF1 process platform, which has been used to ship more than 650,000 production devices - including more than 50,000 monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) - since volume shipments began in 2009. A total of 100 XPT1015 devices from four wafers were subjected to a 15:1 VSWR (voltage standing wave ratio) at all phase angles with 90°C base-plate temperature. During VSWR testing, all devices were operated in a saturated average power condition, being driven by a 4000 carrier 200MHz wideband signal with a 19.5dB peak-to-average ratio. The devices showed 100% survivability and only ~0.2dB average change in saturated output power.

“Historically, there have been markets which Nitronex could not address because our products did not meet their stringent robustness requirements,” says VP of engineering Ray Crampton. “We made reliability, robustness, and ruggedness a priority over the last several quarters. Our new XPT1015 is our first 28V product explicitly designed for severe operating environments,” he adds. “In addition, our recently announced 48V platform was also designed from the ground up to meet very severe environmental requirements.”

Nitronex’s patented SIGANTIC GaN-on-Si process is claimed to be the only production-qualified GaN process using an industry-standard 4” silicon substrate. Nitronex reckons that this results in a robust, scalable supply chain, and positions it well for the growth expected from emerging GaN markets such as military communications, CATV, radar, commercial wireless, satellite communications, and point-to-point microwave.

Nitronex is currently providing prototypes to select customers, and the XPT1015 is expected to be available to the broader market later this year.

Tags: Nitronex GaN RF transistors

Visit: www.nitronex.com