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LOS ANGELES, June 18, 2007. HRL Laboratories, LLC has been awarded a contract with funding of $18.2 million, including options, from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) to develop advanced technology for intimately integrating CMOS and 400 GHz indium phosphide (InP) transistors onto a single complex integrated circuit.
The unique approach being developed at HRL solves the problem of how to integrate materials and devices from completely different material systems like InP and silicon while maintaining the advantages provided by both. The economy of scale, yield and complexity of silicon combined with ultrafast InP enables a new generation of high performance circuitry.
Applications that can immediately benefit from the integration technology include communications, radar, and sensor systems. By integrating two disparate technologies like CMOS and InP, one can obtain dramatic improvement in the linearity, dynamic range and bandwidth of mixed-signal circuits such as digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters.
The HRL technology offers outstanding overlay accuracy, solves thermal expansion and stress issues, and maximizes connectivity between CMOS and InP transistors. The approach is fully compatible with the device and interconnect scaling needed for future technology generations.
The integration technology is also extendible to optical components as well as devices based on other materials and will provide a straightforward extension of the silicon roadmap to enable extremely high data rate optical data streams when applied to other types of components.
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HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, California, is a corporate R&D laboratory owned by Boeing and General Motors. HRL provides custom R&D and performs additional R&D contract services for its LLC Members, for the U.S. government, and for other commercial entities.
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