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Industry  Power Transistors


NXP goes with GaN


Following several years of development with UMS and Fraunhofer Freiburg Institute, NXP is starting to launch a family of high-performance GaN-on-SiC power transistors that will complement its hugely successful silicon LDMOS products, says the company’s Director of Marketing for RF Power, Mark Murphy.


A


t NXP we have recently unveiled our activities in bringing RF power GaN


products to the market, which are a significant strand in our portfolio development for the coming years. We believe this demonstrates to the electronics industry something of a breakthrough in the maturity of the technology, as it progresses from being a boutique-only affair to part of a broad range of products from a leading high performance RF supplier like ourselves.


NXP GaN - the story so far


Our firm is not a latecomer to GaN – we are firm believers in the many benefits this wide bandgap semiconductor brings and our involvement stems back through many years of research and development. We are investing in GaN for different market segments, which will inevitably result in more than one GaN process to meet the different product-application requirements.


Significantly, for the RF power activity, we have had a great partnership with United Monolithic Semiconductors (UMS) and the Fraunhofer Freiburg Institute that has helped the technology mature by leaps and bounds to the point today, where we can prepare for the first product releases. In-house testing has gone well these past months and we have been boosted by some glowing endorsements from selected customer sampling. As of today, we are well underway with a full release of the wafer process and the first phase of product designs.


The products that we will release will compete in the market for RF power transistors, which will break the $1 billion mark in 2011, according to independent market research. Products built from GaN will play an increasing role in this sector, and are tipped to take as much as 30 percent of this market by 2014. If true, this would lead to a GaN RF power transistors market of at least $300 million.


Fig.1


For such numbers to come to fruition, GaN technology needs to be supported by mainstream vendors. In the world of RF power, we are the first to offer such an


GaN clearly outperforms silicon LDMOS at 2.1 GHz


August / September 2011 www.compoundsemiconductor.net 23


extensive portfolio that covers both silicon LDMOS and GaN products – combined these two technologies will account for nearly 90 percent of the RF power market.


This leads to the obvious question: what makes GaN a winner for RF power applications? Simply put, this material makes a step increase in efficiency and power density performance over silicon LDMOS in most applications. The suitability of semiconductors for RF power transistors is captured in the Johnson’s Figure of Merit (FoM) – a combination of material constants that starts with 1 for silicon as a reference and ends with 324 for GaN. To put this into some context, GaAs, another commonly used compound material in RF, has a FoM of 1.44. Suffice to say, GaN truly represents a breakthrough technology.


To make the most of the benefits of GaN we will use devices fabricated on SiC substrates and package them using the latest low-thermal-resistance materials. The excellent thermal properties of SiC mean that we can exploit the higher operating temperature capabilities of GaN versus LDMOS by keeping the transient thermal impedance down to a minimum – an important requirement for an RF power transistor.


The first product in NXP’s GaN power product portfolio is the CLF1G0530-50, a broadband amplifier


spanning the 500-3000 MHz range that has a nominal P1dB of 50W


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