Replacing Silicon With Gallium Nitride In Chips Could Reduce Energy Use By 20%

Mickeycaskill writes: Cambridge Electronics Inc (CEI), formed of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), claim semiconductors made of gallium nitride (GaN) could reduce the power consumption of data centers and consumer electronics by 20 percent by 2025. CEI has revealed a range of GaN transistors and power electronic circuits that have just one tenth of the resistance of silicon, resulting in much higher energy efficiency. The company claims to have overcome previous barriers to adoption such as safety concerns and expense through new manufacturing techniques. "Basically, we are fabricating our advanced GaN transistors and circuits in conventional silicon foundries, at the cost of silicon. The cost is the same, but the performance of the new devices is 100 times better," Cambridge Electronics researcher Bin Lu said.

Comments

One question

[viperidaenz]

What's Gallium Nitrade?

Re:One question

[BeerCat]

What's Gallium Nitrade?

It's like lemonade, only 100 times better...

Re:One question

[XxtraLarGe]

What's Gallium Nitrade?

If I had to guess, it's probably similar to Gallium Nitride. Or just a typo, but the "a" & "i" keys are pretty far apart...

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably some re-branded form of gatorade.
Either that or a misspelling of Gallium Nitrate.

Re:One question

[wcrowe]

It has electrolytes. It's what plants crave.

Re:One question

[ClickOnThis]

If I had to guess, it's probably similar to Gallium Nitride. Or just a typo, but the "a" & "i" keys are pretty far apart...

I use a Neo keyboard layout you insensitive clod!

[No, just kidding. QWERTY here, for better or worse.]

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

It's what makes white LEDs possible.

Re:One question

[MillionthMonkey]

Fallium nitrade is a main ingredient in energy drinks and health beverages. They all supply 100% of the U.S. RDA of gallium.

Re:One question

[darkain]

But only 20% 100 times better, at the same cost.

Re:One question

[Locke2005]

"Gallium Nitrade" is proof that the slashdot editors STILL don't check their spelling... (The linked article calls it "gallium nitride".)

Re:One question

[bored_lurker]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Gallium+N...

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww. Sarcasm fail.

Re:One question

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

Gallium Nitrade is when you sell the stuff after office hours.

Re:One question

[sconeu]

I thought that was Brawndo?

Re:One question

[viperidaenz]

Google suggests it's Gallium Nitride

Although it could also be a typo of Gallium Nitrate

They're quite different though, one being GaN the other being Ga(NO3)3
One is used for semiconductor manufacturing, the other a drug related to cancer treatment.

Re:One question

[viperidaenz]

Looks like they edited the title and fixed it up.

Re: One question

[Anonymous Coward]

It's what you should make when life gives you gallium nitride.

Re:One question

[unixisc]

Something that's nowhere near as abundant as silicon

Re: One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Phallium nitrade is my favorite protein shake.

Re: One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Uranium Argonide Sulphur Oxide Gallium Yttride.

Denser chips

[Alain Williams]

This suggests less heat which means that chips could be packed in more densely, need smaller heat sinks. This could also remove some of the heat issues associated with multi layer chips.

A win in many ways!

Re:Denser chips

[x0ra]

OOTH, none of these relate to the current limitations manufacturer are hitting, which is that lithography at the current scales are becoming nearly impossible.

Re:Denser chips

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And then, the Jevons paradox will take care of negating those savings... ;)

Re:Denser chips

[Ottawakismet]

Isn't Gallium much much more scarce than silicon? Does this increased cost justify its increased efficiency?

Re:Denser chips

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the fact that we produce 1.3 million tons of silicon, 15% are refined into semiconductor grade, and 5% of that is used for integrated circuits. That means we use 9750 tons of silicon each year.

The total production of gallium in 2012 was 273 metric tons.

All the figures were borrowed from wikipedia, so take them with a grain of sand (pun intended) but I can see through these figures like they should be made of glass (again pun intended) and they don't add up.

Re:Denser chips

[Anonymous Coward]

But is that a demand side or supply side limitation?

Re:Denser chips

[MattskEE]

Gallium Nitride (GaN) isn't going to be used for digital computer, rather it is being targeted towards power conversion circuits such as computer power supplies and motor drives. For these applications gate lengths are typically of the order of 1 micron which is child's play compared to the ultra scaled digital devices.

GaN's circuit size advantage is only partially from the reduced size of the chip, it is the fact that the GaN transistor can operate faster while producing less heat in power conversion circuits. Since the transistor produces less waste heat the heatsink is smaller. Since it can switch faster it means that the inductor and capacitor filter components can be smaller. All of this translates into much higher power per volume.

What goes around, comes around

[BeerCat]

I remember back in the 80s that light meters in cameras used to use Silicon (SPD - Silicon Photo Diode), but then they all started using Gallium Arsenide (GASP - Gallium Arsenide Photo Diode), as it reacted faster (presumably because of the lower resistance).

There was even talk back then about making Gallium based semi-conductors, for the same reason.

Good to see it coming to fruition

Re: What goes around, comes around

[MyDixieWrecked]

I read a book a while back called "the disappearing spoon" where it discussed how earlier semiconductors used gallium, but were failure prone due to the heat (gallium has a very low melting temperature). Silicon was a godsend and once that was used, it changed semiconductors forever.

My first thought after reading the summary was "oh no! Not this again!" But the "nitrade" may make a huge difference. Hopefully this is the case.

Re: What goes around, comes around

[Anonymous Coward]

*My* first thought was that gallium is a whole lot more expensive than silicon.

Re:What goes around, comes around

[Mr D from 63]

What are the safety issues that the article refers to? I assume it has to do with chemicals required to manufacture, but it is unclear.

Re: What goes around, comes around

[Alain Williams]

I seem to remember early transistors being made of germanium - on the row below silicon and one to the right of gallium

Re: What goes around, comes around

[aitikin]

I seem to remember early transistors being made of germanium - on the row below silicon and one to the right of gallium

Still are in guitar pedals, particularly vintage sounding fuzz pedals. Very vibey and not 100% reliable, so I'm glad we moved away from them for other purposes.

Re:What goes around, comes around

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Are you sure it wasn't CdS and silicon, actually? It doesn't sound plausible to me that the reaction time of silicon devices would be problematic for light meters. Even for flash meters, actually.

Re: What goes around, comes around

[Anonymous Coward]

I have said book, and the story was about dipping a music player of some sort into hot oil, while it had the original Germanium transistors, not gallium, which they mentioned using in pranks by making spoons from it that would melt when used to stir tea. They then demoed the silicon ones by replace the transistors and dunking the thing again.

Re:What goes around, comes around

[MattskEE]

Back in the 80's they would have been talking mainly about Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) which is what enabled cell phone and wifi transceivers. Now silicon is taking much of that market back from GaAs since silicon has improved to the point where it is good enough for these applications and can be cheaper and more highly integrated.

Gallium Nitride got going in the 90's, being explored by the DoD for radar and other radio applications. In fact one of the goals was to just get better solid state drive amplifiers to drive really high power vacuum tubes. Now GaN is good enough to drive the radar directly (though tubes can still do some things that GaN can't).

Now that GaN has matured enough people are taking it into the power conversion market. EPC and Transphorm are two such companies with released devices.

Re:What goes around, comes around

[ChrisMaple]

GaAs has a better match to the visible spectrum than Si (not much IR response in GaAs due to the larger bandgap). This was valuable particularly for film cameras, as common films were not IR sensitive.

The response speed of silicon is plenty fast. Prior to the use of silicon, cadmium sulfide and cadmium selenide (IIRC) were used in light meters, and their method of operation was much different from silicon photodiodes. CdS was used as a bulk photoresistor, and due to inherent multiplication properties was much more sensitive than silicon. The disadvantages were that the multiplication process made the devices slow, and shoddy design and manufacturing techniques caused the devices to degrade and become useless after a couple of decades.

Re: What goes around, comes around

[MattskEE]

Gallium Nitride has an extremely high melting point, it is usually grown at temperatures above 600C.

Re:What goes around, comes around

[Anonymous Coward]

There was even talk back then about making Gallium based semi-conductors, for the same reason.

We didn't just talk about it, at Convex Computer we shipped them in 1991. They were manufactured by Vitesse Semiconductor and yields were low. But supercomputing is a low volume business so, while it was a PITA, it wasn't a show-stopper.

Re:What goes around, comes around

[BeerCat]

Interesting to hear more about the different kinds of photodiodes - my knowledge was far more superficial (coming from hobbyist magazines, that tended not to go into the details)

Re:What goes around, comes around

[Anonymous Coward]

Silicon is also an indirect bandgap material, which makes it far less sensitive than GaAs. Basically to pop out an electron for Si, you need a photon and a phonon, whereas for GaAs just a photon of sufficient energy will suffice.

Re: What goes around, comes around

[vandamme]

You're referring to Germanium, which was used in the 50's.

No gallium nitrade in chips!

[wcrowe]

Hey! I don't want any artificial ingredients in my chips! Just potatoes, oil, and salt, that's it!

Re:No gallium nitrade in chips!

[Coren22]

Be careful of that Sodium Chloride, it sounds pretty scary. I have also heard, that if you reduce the amount you ingest, it reduces your blood pressure. This is scary stuff!

Re:No gallium nitrade in chips!

[Locke2005]

Dihydrogen Monoxide kills hundreds of times more people every year than Sodium Chloride does... If you die from Sodium Chloride, to the police categorize it as assault?

Re:No gallium nitrade in chips!

[Michael Woodhams]

What really keeps police busy is high school chemistry lessons. You know the one where you dissolve crystals in water, put in some electrodes and run a current through? That will get you charged with assault and battery.

Re:No gallium nitrade in chips!

[sconeu]

I heard that Hydroxylic Acid is just as dangerous as DHMO

100 times better, but 20% energy savings?

[rickyb]

Wait, it performs 100 times better, but there's only 20% in energy savings? Um ...

Re:100 times better, but 20% energy savings?

[Anonymous Coward]

"resulting in much higher energy efficiency"

So yes assuming he didn't misspoke. That would equate to being faster and using less electricity *compared to current chips.*

Re:100 times better, but 20% energy savings?

[RingDev]

I would ass-u-me that this would mean that over a period of time X, a current generation chip would process Y commands consuming N units of energy.

The new chip would perform 2Y commands over X time while only consuming .8N units of energy.

Or that each command execution would take 80% of the energy of a current gen chip, but that it could complete twice as many of them in the same time period, meaning a net increase of ~60% energy consumption at sustained max load.

Tons of ways to play with the statistics on this one, and the 100% performance improvement and 20% energy efficiency improvement are not mutually exclusive. But the summary doesn't give any context or detail, so without RTFA, it should be considered nothing more than marketing speak.

-Rick

Re:100 times better, but 20% energy savings?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article isn't a bit clear about this.

I'm guessing that they use Gallium Nitrade in POWER TRANSISTORS, the kinds used in power supplies.

Said transistors might have 1/100th the resistance, so that might cut power consumption by 20%.

Re:100 times better, but 20% energy savings?

[rickyb]

100 times better != 100% performance improvement. 100 times better = 10000% performance improvement.

Re:100 times better, but 20% energy savings?

[nerdbert]

Switching power supply efficiencies are typically in the range of 60-80% depending on load, configuration etc. Typically, slightly more than half of the "wasted" power is in the switches, and about half of that is switching the gates themselves if you're trying to go much above 5 MHz (as you go higher and higher frequency, you burn more and more energy charging/discharging the gate of the switch and your efficiency drops, which is why you don't typically see non-integrated switching power supplies above 5-10 MHz). So even best case, completely eliminating the resistance of the switch will only buy you a 20% savings in energy, and even then that's assuming a power supply that's not well tuned to its load.

GaN is neat stuff, but gallium is nasty and can be both dangerous and touchy to process. It's been "the next new thing" for switching power supplies now for at least 5 years, but this is the first time I've seen someone actually announce general purpose devices using it.

Gallium Nitrade Valley does not have the same ring

[Aristos Mazer]

I think this may be a marketing mistake. Can we get the performance boost with the new substance but continue to call the new substance "silicon"? Perhaps we could rename silicon as something else to free up the namespace? "Silicon classic" perhaps? :-)

Resistance to Power

[Thelasko]

It's been a while since I took electronics. Doesn't power consumption increase with lower resistance for a given voltage? These claims seem counter intuitive.

Re:Resistance to Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Lower resistance means throwing less energy away as waste heat, giving you the freedom of either making your chips faster, or require less cooling.

Re:Resistance to Power

[Anonymous Coward]

I never took electronics, but I a quick look at the equations for resistance, voltage, and amps, I imagine this would only hold true for the same voltage. Lower resistance means you can lower the voltage to get the same power output.

Re:Resistance to Power

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a while since I took electronics. Doesn't power consumption increase with lower resistance for a given voltage? These claims seem counter intuitive.

The power transistor is not going to be across your voltage rail, short-circuiting it (that would be kind of useless, wouldn't it?). In order to perform the switching action in a switch-mode converter, it is basically going to be in series with whatever it is you're powering from the converter. So it's the current i through the transistor that is set and the power dissipation due to Joule effect (usually called "conduction loss" in a transistor) is P=R*i. Half the resistance, half the conduction loss.

Re:Resistance to Power

[Michael Woodhams]

Ohm's law: V=IR => I = V/R
Power dissipated in a resister: P=VI
Substituting for I from Ohm's law: P=V^2/R
So for a fixed voltage, you dissipate more energy with a low resistance. This would be what you're remembering from electronics. For example if you attempt to short high tension power lines with a dry kite string, the effect will be unimpressive. On the other hand if you short them with a solid copper bar, expect to be rained with molten copper.

However it is not the case that you're going to take a circuit and replace a Si device with a GaN device and leave everything else (including the voltage) unchanged. You design your circuit to provide voltages appropriate to the components it contains. If you need a certain current to make a device work, and can adjust the voltage to provide that current, then instead you get P=I^2R, and lowering R lowers the power dissipation.

Re:Resistance to Power

[Anonymous Coward]

Logic transistors are used as "switches", fully on or fully off.

A perfect switch will have no resistance. Resistance is where heat is produced (P = I^2 x R), which then has to be dissipated.

Re:Resistance to Power

[bobbied]

Close...

Actually the issue is the amount of power the device dissipates. Lowering the resistance of the device the current is flowing though, lowers the voltage for the same current flow. Power = Voltage X Current So if you lower the voltage for the same current, the device heats up less, it wastes less as heat.

Disputation is how much heat the device must get rid of to stay within it's working temperature range. If it gets too hot, it will stop working, so you have to get rid of all the power it wastes as heat. If you cannot get rid of the heat, you must slow the device down, or make it bigger so there is more surface area to get rid of the heat.

So this power issue really is a heat issue and if you can lower the power being turned into heat, you can make devices that run fast and are smaller.

Re:Resistance to Power

[nerdbert]

Switching power supplies are complicated, but here's a simple conceptual version.

You've got a high voltage coming in. You've got a transistor that you turn on and off that goes to a capacitor and to your load. You pulse the voltage at the capacitor/load and turn the switch on and off to keep the voltage at the load close to what you want by varying the width of the pulse. Ideally you want that transistor to conduct with zero resistance when it's on so that you deliver current to the load with no power dissipation. That's why GaN is a good solution, since its channel resistance is much lower than typical Si transistors.

To give you an idea, what I just described is like calling a computer something that does 1s and 0s to put pretty pictures on the screen. Practical systems require stability analysis, use inductors as well as capacitors, dual switching, have to worry about EMI, etc.

Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[elgol]

Efficient Power Conversion (EPC)

GaN Systems

Transphorm

Panasonic

Infineon

Disclaimer: I work for one of the listed companies. We welcome new members to the GaN club!

I apologize to the ones that I missed.

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[Anonymous Coward]

And of those companies above, only EPC has a serious product range that you can actually buy from an electronic component distributor, based on a technology that can be considered quite mature now (they started selling them in 2009, they're at their 4/5th gen now).
For a few months now, GaN Systems has also been offering 2 references through a distributor, but they're still the early production run kind of stuff with incomplete datasheets and cost like several dozens bucks a piece. But unlike EPC, their technology already scales up to 650V.

Others are mostly talking about their technology, their products and how great they are and showing off demo circuits and stuff, but you still can't get your hands on anything like an actual production model of their transistors (by this I mean not something you have to e-mail their sales guys and sign NDAs to get). And this has been going on for several years for most of them.

BTW I don't think you missed any of the meaningful companies, I mean not in the "normally-off GaN FETs for power electronics" space, except for RFMD which recently decided to use their experience with normally-on GaN FETs for RF power amplification in order to build "Source-Switched FETs" for power switching (AFAICT this just means they're going the cascode way like Transphorm, an approach I don't believe in so much in the mid-term, much less long-term).

So judging by the (very little) info they give out about them, CEI's transistors suck, like, pretty badly. 290mOhm for a 650V power FET is really not impressive by any standard, but for a 200V transistor it's quite shocking. They'd better be minuscule chips with ridiculously low parasitic capacitances to have such high on-resistances (and I mean low by GaN's already low standards).

(Yeah, I'm finishing my PhD on the use of GaN transistors for a specific application area, so I happen to know quite a bit about them guys after all those years)

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually there is also Hittite (now Analog Devices) which makes a few high power RF GaN amplifiers. However the HMC999 was removed from the catalog...
From what I understand, one of the big advantages of GaN is that it can operate at much higher temperatures than silicon. Often the solder shall melt before the chip dies, unless you use a special solder. Great for Venus space probes...

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[Anonymous Coward]

Raytheon is also a leader in this area.

http://www.raytheon.com/capabi...

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[BetterSense]

Cree (the LED company) also makes high power GaN RF chips. The power and RF chip division is about to be spun off into an unnamed company in a few months.

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[Anonymous Coward]

Also : Avogy (see avogy.com)

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[MattskEE]

Raytheon does GaN for RF application, not power conversion. They may have dabbled in power conversion but they're probably too expensive of a company to go after the commercial power conversion market.

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[Anonymous Coward]

(AFAICT this just means they're going the cascode way like Transphorm, an approach I don't believe in so much in the mid-term, much less long-term).

Out of curiosity, why is that? The co-packaging cost, or inter-chip wiring parasitics?

Re:Other companies doing Gallium Nitride (GaN)

[Anonymous Coward]

Both. (and more)

The mere fact that packaging has to exist, for a start. That adds cost, complexity and parasitics (low-voltage GaN FETs really demand ridiculously low parasitics to shine). Note that EPC only makes bare die flip-chip transistors and GaN Systems use a "package" which is basically the chip on its back embedded in a bit of PCB (and their components are way more expensive for the moment, I wonder how much is due to their technology being younger and how much to this packaging step).

A cascode allows to emulate normally-off operation with a normally-on GaN FET, but when you look closely, the way it works is in many ways different enough. Reverse conduction, for example, goes through both the low-side control Si MOSFET and the cascoded GaN FET so you still have some recovery charge and stuff.
Also gate drive : you drive the MOSFET gate, which is usually shown as an advantage because it's isolated and can handle +-20V etc, but you don't really benefit from GaN's ultra-low gate capacitance. Indeed the Miller effect will be very low due to the MOSFET only ever seeing a low drain-source voltage (the GaN FET handles the rest) but you still have to fill up the good ol' gate-source capacitance.

Multiple uses for the stuff

[TheHawke]

It's also used in LED's, plus military applications like active phased array radar systems. This breakthrough will make the LED market cost plummet, plus bring the modern radar systems cost down even lower to where other gov't agencies like NOAA and even upper crust civilian markets to own the radar for their own uses.

The heck with data centers...

[Locke2005]

Wouldn't this increase battery life in mobile devices? Data centers could all be run off of solar/wind/wave power, if we really cared about energy use.

Manufacturing

[Anonymous Coward]

To first order, low power is related to small feature size. How can gallium anyide (or -ade) fab compete with silicon fab, which is very highly refined?

Re:Manufacturing

[mspohr]

They are making their gallium circuits in the same fabs as silicon... these are highly refined... one might say they are very upper crust.

Re:Manufacturing

[Anonymous Coward]

To first order, low power is related to small feature size.

That's true for logic, but these transistors are used for the switched mode power supplies that regulate the voltage for the CPU/GPU/memory. For power (and RF amplification), geometries are not state of the art and these products can be manufatured with far from state-of-the-art equipment, which can easily be found. GaN adds some steps to the process but mostly reuses equipement which otherwise would be discarded.
Switch mode power supplies are not completely trivial to optimize for efficiency and the switching component is critical. For a given voltage rating, GaN transistors have a much lower on resistance for a given gate charge. With a lower gate charge it is possible increase the switching frequency, which means that the inductive components have lower values, are smaller or have lower conductor (IR) losses.

I doubt it is for *chips* themselves

[PaulBu]

TFA is a bit light on details, but (having heard of GaN before), it is good at handling large voltages/currents, and they are probably talking about more efficient power supplies (saving 20%, apparently), not replacing Si in logic chips. Or maybe integrating power conversion onto processor die itself, but the latter is still made of good old CMOS. Currently, from what I've heard, a good chunk of pins on your processor are used to supply power -- if you think of it, 30W processor with 3V bias needs to get 10A of current.

Paul B.

everything old is new again?

[roc97007]

Back in the seventies, working for a military contractor, we built microwave communications and countermeasures equipment using GaAs devices. Later, working for the cell phone industry in the early nineties, I seem to remember that at least some manufacturers were switching to GaAs-based radios in cell phones. It's my impression that even today they're used often for high frequency devices. Seems like the only news here is the improved method of manufacture, as the technology has been around for decades.

Re:everything old is new again?

[Moof123]

GaAs and GaN have some real advantages over silicon, but price and density has not been their strong suit. Silicon is cheap per unit of area, and is compatible with copper metallization. GaAs in particular has always been sensitive to copper contamination, hence the use of gold for most of the interconnects. GaN has very fast switching speeds while handling an order of magnitude more voltage than GaAs (~10x the breakdown for the same Ft). So for a ~100 GHz Ft silicon can handle just a volt or so (think 65 nm nodes and smaller to get those speeds), GaAs can handle about ~5V, and GaN is more like 40V.

The real story here is the ability to run GaN with existing silicon equipment with silicon type costs, rather than the relatively low density fab equipment GaAs and GaN are usually processed on (usually the repurposed cast-offs from old silicon fabs).

GaN by its nature operates at high voltages, like 15V minimum, so don't expect a GaN based processor any time in the near future. Instead it sounds like they are claiming a 100x improvement in the Ron*Coff figure of merit for power switching devices. The payoff would be smaller and more efficient power electronics, such as the mentioned laptop supply brick, electric car power electronics, etc. Don't expect this has any bearing on the plateau of Moore's Law.

Re:everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gallium Nitride . Different molecule, different properties.

Re:everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

GaAs is old, but still useful for RF semiconductors. Small wafers, special foundries, and higher cost are the norm.
GaN is new(er) and holds many performance and process advantages. Higher voltage tolerance, lower resistance, better thermal conductivity, allowing transistors to be made smaller with attendant lower capacitance’s. This means much faster switching times, or higher maximum frequency and power. Higher voltage tolerant parts means the ratio between current and voltage could be closer to the "normal" 50 Ohms, used in RF-circuits, making the transformation easier. The device's internal resistance is a loss factor which should better be the small compared to "source impedance" of the part.
Adapting GaN to digital circuits makes sense. Die shrinks reduce geometries with lower capacitance as a bonus, power losses in the dielectric creates heat.
Making chips faster with better materials would be an alternate route to a geometry shrink.

Re:everything old is new again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse than that even. Gallium Arsenide has been touted as the Next Big Thing for literally decades now and where is it? Mainstream chip design doesn't use GaAs at all.

There used to be a company, Vitesse I believe it was. They made big claims about their GaAs designs and how important it was going to be. Both as a technology and as a company. Heard much from them lately? Anyone?

Not that I'm against anyone trying. And we usually have to try 100 things to get one viable, widely used technology. However the whole Gallium is Going to be Huge message is old and has pretty much all the credibility wrung out of it. Indeed, how about every alternate semiconductor to Silicon, ever?

And changing GaAs to Gallium SomethingElse doesn't change the credibility picture enough to matter.

Re:everything old is new again?

[ChrisMaple]

In the vicinity of the 0.35 micron node, GaAs starts to lose its speed advantage over silicon in digital circuits. That was Vitesse's smallest process, after which they stopped making new GaAs CMOS. They've lost immense amounts of money since then and became essentially worthless. In April of this year Microsemi acquired the pathetic remains.

More like GaNOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Gallium NITROUS
YEAH!!!!!

Ghz Stagnated fpr a decade now

[MrL0G1C]

Where are the 100Ghz chips? fck these 20% more effecient chips, ditch silicon already, it's too slow.

Re:Gallium Nitrade Valley does not have the same r

[ArcadeMan]

Please don't. We must do everything in our power to avoid "Cherry Silicon".

Where's the news?

[anarkhos]

Wasn't this known since the 1970s?

Cosmic Top Secret

[Anonymous Coward]

Gallium based semiconductors with their unique properties are exclusive military assets (for use in electronic warfare, radars, jammers, etc.). All major powers would freak out if anybody proposed widespread civilian adoption!

Re:Cosmic Top Secret

[zenith1111]

Are you sure? http://www.digikey.com/product...

More likely InP - that's on the roadmap

[Anonymous Coward]

GaN is already being used for power MOSFETs but not so much in scope for digital.