Develop a European industrial foundry process for Gallium Nitride power Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC) covering applications from Ka-band to V-band.

 

GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMT) are an enabling technology for a wide range of space applications in Telecommunication, Earth observation, navigation and science requiring high power and/or low noise amplification. At the present, these processes in Europe are limited to Ku-band (0.25um process) and the required components from the US and Japan fall under export restrictions. There is an urgent need for making a competitive (in terms of performance and price) European version covering applications at higher frequencies between Ka- and V-band. Examples of applications include solid-state power amplifiers (SSPA) and robust low noise amplifiers (LNA) for mm-wave payloads with Earth observation and telecom applications, e.g. Ka-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Ka-/Q-/V-band receiver front-ends, Ka-/Q-/V-band high data rate downlinks, Ka-/Q-/V-band Inter Satellite Links (ISL) and high power LO sources.

 

This activity continues a previous TDE activity by further developing and performing preliminary space evaluation of 0.15-0.1?m GaN process on a fully industrial manufacturing line. Pending the results of this activity a full ESCC space evaluation of the process can be launched.

 

This activity encompasses the following tasks:

- Industrial technology capability assessment and preparation for evaluation

- Design of evaluation test vehicles (Technology Characterization Vehicle, Dynamic Evaluation Circuit, Representative Integrated Circuit) and definition of a pre-evaluation test plan

- Wafer manufacturing

- Evaluation testing

- Results assessment