A Wafer Used for 6G Wireless Communications
The Korea Advanced Nano Fab Center (KANC) announced on Oct. 17 that it has developed a technique for metal organic chemical vapor deposition-based growth of an EPI wafer for manufacturing an indium phosphide (InP) high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) device for high-speed communication.
An indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) channel InP HEMT device has the characteristics of the III-V compound semiconductor that the electron mobility is higher than those of all other existing semiconductor materials. This switching element is characterized by switching at least 10 times faster than those of existing silicon transistor devices and can be used for terahertz wave applications such as 6G wireless communications and quantum computer manufacturing. At present, South Korea’s EPI wafer self-supply is zero percent.
South Korea has worked on compound semiconductor-based communication devices since the 1980s. The current method is semiconductor device fabrication on imported EPI wafers, that is, a method dependent on imports.
The InGaAs channel InP HEMT device developed by the KANC, however, is an independent technique. As for the electrical characteristics of the device, the cutoff frequency at a transistor gate length of 100 nm is 305 GHz and the maximum resonant frequency is 455 GHz, the finest in the world.
InP HEMT devices have been used only in certain fields, including deep space communication, radio astronomy, meteorological observation and medicine. This is because an extremely high level of low-noise amplification is required for a very low signal intensity. These days, the use is expected to widen to cover low-noise amplifier manufacturing for quantum computing signal transmission and 6G wireless communications.