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Nov 4 4:00 PM EST

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To: Zeev Hed who wrote (909)	12/15/1999 2:04:00 AM
From: Merlin	Read Replies (2) of 1099

The GaAs devices I worked with 15 years ago used silicon nitride passivation. As a passivation material, silicon nitride has a larger dielectric constant and a lower band gap than silicon dioxide. For dielectrics in ULSI devices, a low dielectric constant is desirable. I'm surprised that gallium nitride would be used as a passivation layer since it is a semiconductor with a band gap of 3.34 volts, and is used in blue laser diodes. Can you provide a reference for its use as a passivation layer? Assume that the raw material cost is $50 instead of $4.50 for an Athlon die. a 600MHz part retails for about $470 and a 650MHz part about $590. It would not take much improvement at the high end to justify the $50. Much of the Si-28 lost during processing of the boule can be recovered and recycled. It not only costs too much to make low speed devices out of GaAs; A CISC GaAs microprocessor with a few million transistors would not be cost competitive with silicon even if it ran at its maximum speed. The thermal conductivity of GaAs is about half that of Si at room temperature, and it is not well suited to high power densities. What is the highest power rating that you have seen on a discrete GaAs device? The point is that from a cost/benefit standpoint, Si-28 will be superior to GaAs for a microprocessor such as the Athlon. Whether or not the cost/benefit of Si-28 is superior to "beach sand" silicon remains to be seen. I don't think that the GaAs market can be characterized as "sizable" if we are comparing to silicon. Also, SiGe is making inroads on the GaAs market due to the ease of using silicon processing techniques. AMCC is making 10GHz devices. Above the limts of GaAs, InP is now being used in commercial products such as TRW's static frequency divider at 69GHz.

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