Date: 09/06/2011

GaN-on- SiC semiconductor devices beats HV silicon and GaAs in reliability

Cree, Inc. has announced that, as of April 2011, the company's RF business unit has shipped commercial GaN-on-SiC RF power transistor and MMIC products with more than 10,000,000 watts of combined RF output power. The 10 million watt figure includes only commercial RF products and excludes an additional 1.5 million watts shipped for GaN MMIC foundry services.

Cree claims, it has attained this milestone while maintaining a remarkable failure-in-time rate (FIT rate) of less than 10-per-billion device hours, which is up to 80% lower than the typical FIT rates for other RF power transistor technologies.

"We have achieved more than 1.4 billion total hours of field operation for our GaN-on-SiC devices, coupled with reliability that surpasses other high voltage silicon or GaAs technologies. This is the largest known body of fielded data accumulated by any domestic GaN supplier to date and includes not only discrete transistors but complex multi-stage GaN MMICs as well. The 10 million watt milestone is a testament to the rapid adoption of our GaN technology-not only for military applications, but for telecom base stations, wide band test equipment, civil radar and medical applications as well. If our expansion into these new market segments continues at the current rate, we have the potential to double the 10 million watt milestone by the end of calendar 2011," explained Jim Milligan, Cree, director of RF.