Gallium arsenide joins the giants

Gallium arsenide has enjoyed a unique position in the electronics industry for more than 25 years. GaAs is emerging as the starting material for integrated circuits with one million or more transistors per chip. The technology today is firmly in the domain of high-performance, very large-scale integration (VLSI), with chip clock rates hitting 100 MHz and up, whilst maintaining a reasonable manufacturing cost. Here, the author describes how present forms of GaAs VLSI are higher-performing versions of silicon VLSI. The GaAs transistors just speed up the same old IC concepts. Still in the future are truly novel chips, incorporating devices like optical emitters or microwave amplifiers that can be built only in GaAs III-V compounds.<
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