Cover Feature
2010 Gaas Foundry
services outlook
In the 1980s, the running joke was “GaAs is the future and always will be.” Up un- til that time it had shown great promise,
but was having a hard time living up to its
performance potential and was plagued by
high material costs and inconsistent processes.
However, due to large investments by the government/military (mostly the DARPA MIMIC
programs) in the 1980s and high commercial
demand for wireless applications in the 1990s
(such as satellite TV and cellular handsets), it
has become the mainstay of the RF/microwave
industry for the last couple of decades. Many
companies built large GaAs fabs in the ‘80s
and ‘90s, but today most rely either totally or
partially on foundries for their supply of chips.
This allows for greater flexibility in fast changing markets and many “fabless” companies
have leveraged this business model to develop
lower fixed cost businesses that have flourished
over the last ten years.
Squeeze Play
Today, GaAs is being squeezed more than
ever by competing Si technologies and newer
high voltage compound semiconductor mate-
rials like GaN and SiC. Recent developments
in Si CMOS and BiCMOS processes have
achieved cut-off frequencies over 300 GHz,1
allowing it to compete in many applications
where GaAs had mostly dominated. Si chips
have a large cost advantage in high volumes
and offer superior digital integration opportu-
nities for single chips solutions (BiCMOS). In
addition, LDMOS processes have significantly
advanced with higher voltage designs that pro-
duce robust transistors capable of output pow-
er performance as good as GaN and SiC, but at
a much lower cost. There is also competition
from UltraCMOS (Peregrine Semiconduc-
tor) for lower power, fast switching applica-
tions. They are now expanding the process with
several other types of devices to further com-
pete with GaAs. SiGe processes are creating
highly integrated single chip solutions at high
frequencies such as automotive radar at 24 and
77 GHz and point-to-point radios. There are a
large number of RF Si foundries that have high
capacities available such as Taiwan Semicon-
ductor (TSMC), Tower/JAZZ Semiconductor,
IHP Microelectronics, IBM, austriamicrosys-
tems, etc., so the costs for large volumes are
relatively low with available capacity.
PATRICK HINDLE
