March 31, 2006, Menlo Park, CA--Group4 Labs, LLC, announces the first two-inch gallium nitride (GaN)-on-diamond semiconductor wafer. The new two-inch version of the recently introduced 10 x 10 mm GaN is the second product in the company's Xero Wafer family. Sharing the same technology, the larger wafer also features a single GaN atomically attached to a synthetic diamond substrate, permitting high-temperature resilience for electronic, solid-state lighting, and military applications.
Group4 Labs' proprietary GaN-on-diamond technology addresses the classic heat problem plaguing the high power and high-speed transistor industry: excessive heat build-up inside the chip's engine that ultimately leads to device failure. The new material offers a unique solution by extricating heat from the chip's core almost at the instant that it is generated. This is due to the nanometer proximity of the chip's active region to diamond, a nearly perfect thermal conductor. CVD diamond's thermal conductivity is about 3X to 30X more than that of conventional semiconductors. Just a 3X improvement in the thermal conductivity of a transistor array's substrate could boost the array's power-density by 10X to 100X depending on device configuration.
According to Group4 Labs' CEO, Felix Ejeckam, "This wafer is a two-inch extension of what we introduced last month." He continues, "It's specially targeted to makers of power amplifiers (for cellular base stations), microwave and millimeter-wave circuits, UV laser diodes and ultra-bright blue/green/white LEDs that need tremendous power and thermal performance at little or no additional cost, compared to currently available semiconductor solutions." The new GaN-on-diamond two-inch wafers are currently sold for $5,000 - $7,000 per unit (depending on quantity) through the company's online store.