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Technology Stocks : Vitesse Semiconductor
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To: Dan Spillane who wrote (276)11/11/1996 11:27:00 AM
From: SI-Shark   of 4710
 
Dan,
Your statement is just plain "un-informed"

GaAs has been around for 25 years it's not new. It has always been just a little faster than silicon and always been replaced once silicon reached the same switching speeds. Even if processing costs were the same Silicon is a much nicer material to work with. GaAs wafers break really easily. As an example on a wafer saw step you can only saw 2 wafers a day of GaAs compared with 100 wafers of silicon. Try to saw faster and you will break the wafer.

As Maxwell points out Silicon can switch at 4GHz. This is probably about a 0.5u process. On 0.25u processes I'm hearing switching speeds of over 8Ghz. CMOS has so many advantages that it will replace GaAs in all but the most critical applications where the slight speed increase or the semi-insulating nature of the substrate make GaAs the best technology. But believe me GaAs will never ever be main stream.

Regards
Si-Shark

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