News: Microelectronics
17 June 2024
WIN releases moisture rugged 0.1µm GaAs pHEMT technology
WIN Semiconductors Corp of Taoyuan City, Taiwan — which provides pure-play gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN) wafer foundry services for the wireless, infrastructure and networking markets — has announced the beta release of its PP10-29 moisture rugged 0.1µm pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology.
Building on the mature and production-proven PP10 platform, the high-performance technology incorporates WIN’s second-generation humidity resistance process EMRII to provide mechanical protection and moisture ruggedness at the wafer level, satisfying bHAST (biased highly accelerated stress test) requirements. To minimize added parasitic capacitance, the EMRII layers form localized air-cavities over all transistors to provide moisture resistance with minimal impact to gain, noise figure and output power. This key feature of PP10-29 mitigates amplifier performance changes from packaging, plastic encapsulation or PCB embedding, and accelerates new product development.
The core of PP10-29 is a versatile 0.1µm-gate D-mode with ft/fmax of 145GHz and 180GHz, respectively (supporting operation at E-band frequencies), and is qualified for 4V operation. Manufactured on 150mm GaAs substrates, the platform offers two interconnect metal layers, air-bridge crossovers, precision tantalum nitride (TaN) resistors, monolithic PN-junction diodes for compact on-chip ESD protection circuits and through-wafer vias for low inductance grounding. Providing a path to new packaging and assembly options, PP10-29 supports multiple DC and RF I/O configurations including standard wire-bonding, front-side Cu-bumps/RDL (copper redistribution layers), and through-chip RF and DC transitions.
PP10-29 has reached beta release and is available for early-access multi-project wafer (MPW) runs. Qualifications testing is complete and final modeling/PDK generation is expected to conclude in August, with full production release scheduled for late third-quarter 2024.
WIN is showcasing its compound semiconductor RF and mm-Wave solutions in booth 531 at the 2024 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS) at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC (16–21 June).
WIN announces beta release of NP12-0B mmWave RF GaN-on-SiC technology
