SBIR-STTR Award

This proposal targets the development of commercially viable Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) process for the manufacturing of high voltage metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors for gallium nitride (GaN) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) applications. In particular, this project objective is to provide a higher dielectric constant substitution for currently used dielectric layers, integrated with metal electrodes. Higher voltage capacitors will enable the development and manufacturing of GaN MMICs with ground-breaking impact on performance, power efficiency, size and cost of many military systems and commercial products.

Benefit:
High-k dielectric ALD holds a key to accelerated commercialization of GaN microwave power amplifiers. When combined with area enhancement techniques, both higher-k dielectrics and area enhancement could provide a much needed 5x boost of capacitance density to enable reliable 50 V operation and reverse the trend of capacitor area increase. Hence, successful development of a high quality high-k ALD manufacturing process will help unleash the promise of GaN MMICs to revolutionize many military and commercial systems and offer greatly improved cost, size, weight, power and efficiency compared to GaAs. Military radar and advanced communication systems will particularly benefit from this advancement. Commercial markets expected to adopt the higher performing chips are cell-phones, wireless communication and commercial radars for the automotive and aerospace markets.

Keywords:
hafnium oxide, hafnium oxide, GaN, ALD, Atomic layer deposition, High-k Dielectric, MIM Capacitor, Power Amplifiers, gallium nitride

This project targets the development of commercially viable Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) process for the manufacturing of high voltage metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors for gallium nitride (GaN) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) applications. In particular, the objective of this project is to provide a higher dielectric constant substitution for currently used dielectric layers, as well as to integrate high work-function metal electrodes and 3D capacitor design. The project intends to develop MIM capacitors with leakage current 200 V operation voltage, 500 pF/mm2 capacitance density and >107 hours MTTF at 50 V and 125 deg C operation temperature.

Benefit:
GaN MMICs will exceed by several orders of magnitude the reliability, linearity, power density and energy efficiency of all existing technologies and will revolutionize the performance of advanced phased array radars, counter improvised explosive devices (C-IED) systems, missile defense systems, Electronic Warfare and communication systems. These Microwave and RF systems are striving for increased range, reduced power consumption and reduced size and weight which could greatly benefit from a vastly improved power density and efficiency of smaller size and up to 5x higher voltage GaN MMICs. Monolithic integrated MIM capacitors are key components that consume substantial area on MMICs. On GaN MMICs, these capacitors must accommodate up to 5x higher operation voltage. This voltage scale up dictates proportional dielectric layer thickness and capacitors area scale up. Alternatively, implementation of high-K dielectrics in combination with high work-function electrodes, as well as area enhancement could keep capacitors area at bay. This project aims at higher voltage capacitors that could enable the development and manufacturing of GaN MMICs with ground-breaking impact on performance, power efficiency, size and cost of many military systems and commercial products. Examples include Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) and Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR). Commercial applications include Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) for 4G-LTE cell-phone towers, Cable TV Push Pull Hybrid, Power Doubler Hybrid and Reverse Hybrid amplifiers, Local Area Networks (LNA) power amplifiers, RF switches for radio applications, Satellite communication, GPS, test equipment and commercial radars for the automotive and aerospace markets.

Keywords:
Hi-K dielectric, ALD, MIM, GaN, MIM Capacitor, AESA radar, MMIC, power amplifier