Gallium arsenide review: past, present and future

The tremendous growth of communications systems in recent years has put a demand on the electronics industry to provide higher speed integrated circuits than are currently available with today´s silicon technology. To help meet this demand, the electronics industry is developing new semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide which already report clock frequencies of 1-3 GHz in GaAs integrated circuits. There have been many exciting breakthroughs in GaAs technology in the last five years including ion implantation techniques, annealing, lithography, circuit design, GaAs materials, and GaAs i.c. testing. Within the next five years GaAs is forecast to be a dominant technology in many high speed applications.