April 3, 2006 – Group4 Labs LLC has developed a 2-in. gallium nitride (GaN)-on-diamond wafer, expanding its recent work in developing 10x10mm substrates. The wafer features a single GaN layer atomically attached to a freestanding CVD-deposited 25µm-thick synthetic diamond substrate; the GaN exposed is ready for further epitaxial deposition.
The device offers 3x-30x more thermal conductivity than conventional semiconductors (a 3x improvement of a transistor array could boost power density by tenfold), due to the “near perfect” thermal conductivity of diamond, according to the company, which says a 3x improvement in thermal conductivity can boost the array’s power density by 10x-1000x depending upon configuration.
Target applications include high-temperature and very high-power, high-frequency electronic applications such as power amplifiers for cellular base stations, microwave and millimeter-wave circuits, UV laser diodes, and ultrabright LEDs.