“The steady rise in the speed of bipolar transistors has relied largely on the vertical scaling of the epitaxial layer structure to reduce the carrier transit time,” says Milton Feng, the Holonyak Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois, whose team has been working on high-speed compound semiconductor transistors since 1995. “However, this comes at the cost of increasing the base-collector capacitance. To compensate for this unwanted effect, we have employed lateral scaling of both the emitter and the collector.”

(November 7, 2003) San Jose, Calif.&#8212The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has released its annual forecast for 2003-2006, highlighting a strong growth forecast for 2004. The association expects global sales of semiconductors in 2003 to increase by 15.8 percent to $163 billion, and it projects 2004 revenues to increase by 19.4 percent to $194.6 billion.