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To: Bob Kim who wrote (138087)	6/25/2001 4:08:49 PM
From: Paul Engel	Respond to of 186894

Bob - Re: "What was the original goal for GaAs? More speed and military stuff? " Initially - more speed - as GaAs has much higher electron mobility than pure Si. Indeed, GaAs has proven valuable for wireless/RF applications - but these are essentially small scale devices. One of the inherent advantages of Si is that a NATIVE OXIDE can be grown on it (SiO2) for device isolation and MOS gates. This one advantage is unavailable in nearly every other technology - which has ultimately limited the success of these competing technologies. Re: "Didn't India fund a few GaAs efforts in the mid-80s in an attempt to jumpstart their chip industry? " I don't remember this - but I do remember the huge investment Seymour Cray put into GaAs with his Cray Computer company and GigaBit logic in the 1980s and early 1990s. As Gordon Moore once quipped, "GaAs was and always will be the technology of the future". Paul