Diamond substrate material for new GaN RF technology

Raytheon Corporation of Massachusetts, USA, has successfully developed a new generation of gallium nitride (GaN) RF technology applications. The Raytheon team, led by the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), successfully used synthetic diamond as a substrate material to replace GaN's existing substrate material, silicon carbide, which increased the thermal conductivity by 3-5 times. Thus, a diamond substrate GaN device was developed.

The researchers found that the diamond substrate material GaN is three times higher than the silicon carbide substrate GaN transistor power density. According to scientists, this new substrate material will solve the existing technical bottleneck of GaN equipment. The staff successfully placed experimental data on a 10x125μm diamond substrate GaN on a high electron mobility transistor (HEMT); this high electron mobility transistor is a two-dimensional electron in a heterojunction or modulation doping structure. Field effect transistors with high gas mobility characteristics, which are an important basis for solid state RF transmitter technology and active electronically scanned array technology (AESAs).

According to Joe Biondi, vice president of military integrated defense systems at Raytheon, the new diamond-based GaN device is currently used in the US Department of Defense (DoD) to improve combat sensing, military communications, and world-scale military electronic warfare. ability.

The diamond substrate material can greatly reduce the thermal resistance, which is the ability of GaN devices to operate at higher power density conditions, while also greatly reducing equipment cost, size, weight and energy supply. At present, GaN is Raytheon's core technology and strong competitiveness, and is also one of the core technologies of the US Navy's air defense-missile defense radar system (AMDR) and the next generation of new jammer system (NGJ). GaN's unique performance is perfect for improving radar technology, military electronic warfare and communications systems, making it smaller, cheaper and more efficient.

At present, with the support of the DARPA Microsystems Technical Office, diamond substrate GaN technology has been matured, from the most basic raw material improvements to advanced transistors, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, receive/transmit components and receive/transmit multi-channel integration. Component. (Compiled from 'Raytheon demonstrates GaN-on-diamond HEMT with 3x increase in power density over GaN-on-SiC')