December 14, 2007 – At this week’s IEDM, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic) said it has built a gallium nitride (GaN) power transistor on a sapphire substrate with ultrahigh breakdown voltage of 10,400V, more than 5X higher than the top mark for other such devices.
The company said it avoided overlapping the electrodes via insulating films on the surface side by using a backside electrode with through-holes in the sapphire, holes formed by a “novel” laser drilling technique using a high-power picosecond laser. A proprietary epitaxial growth technology helped elicit the GaN’s inherent material properties, enabling both the high breakdown voltage and a low on-state resistance (186Ωcm2). Applications for 110 domestic and 69 international patents have been filed.
