Gallium arsenide joins the giants

Author

Deyhimy, Ira

Author_Institution

Vitesse Semicond. Corp., Camarillo, CA, USA

Volume

32

Issue

2

fYear

1995

fDate

2/1/1995 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

33

Lastpage

40

Abstract

Gallium arsenide has enjoyed a unique position in the electronics industry for more than 25 years. GaAs is emerging as the starting material for integrated circuits with one million or more transistors per chip. The technology today is firmly in the domain of high-performance, very large-scale integration (VLSI), with chip clock rates hitting 100 MHz and up, whilst maintaining a reasonable manufacturing cost. Here, the author describes how present forms of GaAs VLSI are higher-performing versions of silicon VLSI. The GaAs transistors just speed up the same old IC concepts. Still in the future are truly novel chips, incorporating devices like optical emitters or microwave amplifiers that can be built only in GaAs III-V compounds

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; MESFET integrated circuits; MMIC; direct coupled FET logic; gallium arsenide; integrated circuit technology; very high speed integrated circuits; DCFL; GaAs; MESFET circuits; VLSI; chip clock rate; electronics industry; integrated circuits; manufacturing cost; microwave amplifiers; optical emitters; semiconductor; transistors; very large-scale integration; Clocks; Costs; Electronics industry; Gallium arsenide; Integrated circuit technology; Large scale integration; Manufacturing; Optical devices; Silicon; Very large scale integration;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Spectrum, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9235

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/6.343984

Filename

343984