Cooling down: Advances in electronics bring big gains

to defence systems Janes IDR

In the past few years, the US Air Force (USAF), US Navy (USN), and US
Marine Corps (USMC) have begun requiring all new radar systems to
include Gallium Nitride (GaN) semi-conductors, a technology that has been
waiting for its moment in the sun.
Ten years ago, the US Department of Defense (DoD) began an effort to
mature GaN seeing it as a future replacement for the legacy material
Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) traditionally used in multifunction radars. The
Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III Program was created to find
"assured, affordable, and commercially viable production capabilities and
capacities for items essential for national defence", according to the Office
of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing & Industrial
Base Policy.
When Lockheed Martin began work in 2005 on Space Fence, a new S-band
radar the USAF was pursuing in order to spot and track space debris that
could potentially wreak havoc on satellites or manned systems, there was a
lot of work going on in parallel at the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) to develop GaN, Steve Bruce, vice-president for
Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin, told IHS Jane's .
"GaN was identified as a critical technology that if it could be matured it
would provide a significant advantage in architecting a space fence system,"
Bruce said. "There was enough data out there that said by the time [the
DoD] got to building space fence it was likely GaN would be mature; but it
needed work."
The defence industry wanted to be able to have high power at each element,
which made the array slightly smaller and GaN promised really high
efficiencies, Bruce noted.
In the mid-2000s, the DoD provided funding to foundries to mature GaN.
Under what the DoD called a Title III programme, DARPA was hoping to
mature GaN so that industry could have predictable yields and parts could be
more affordable, Bruce said.

"The economics said I could not pay too much for each of these GaN power
amplifiers," he said.
At about the same time, Lockheed Martin had completed a system design
review for Space Fence. By the time the company began its preliminary
design review, it was already on its third iteration of GaN power amplifiers,
Bruce added.
Lockheed Martin was also developing a new L-band radar for the USAF
called the Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar (3DELRR).
The USAF wanted the radar built using GaN.
"We demonstrated TRL [Technology Readiness Level] 6 in 2010, so we
were able to demonstrate you could build a high-power L-band transmitter
using GaN technology," Bruce said.
Unlike its competitors, Lockheed Martin did not have a fabrication facility
or foundry. Instead the company turned to commercial foundries Cree and
TriQuint Semiconductor (in 2014 TriQuint merged with RF Micro Devices
to form Qorvo). Bruce said Lockheed Martin's model was to design their
systems' needs into the two commercial foundries and then let the two
companies compete for Lockheed Martin's business.
"That gave us a real competitive advantage to get both of those foundries
sort of battling against each other and competition tends to drive the price
down," he said.
With its Space Fence radar at TRL 5, Lockheed Martin undertook a lot of
work optimising the Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC)
designs that they were developing along with Cree and TriQuint to get the
Space Fence power amplifiers as affordable and reliable as possible, Bruce
added.
GaN got to the point where it was mature enough in about 2011-12.
"It really became a technology that you could go build and put in a
production radar. In 2012 we achieved TRL 7 for Space Fence," he said.
As of June 2014, Qorvo had achieved Manufacturing Readiness Level

(MRL) 9 and in July 2014 Qorvo's GaN manufacturing processes achieved

TRL 9, meeting full performance, cost and capacity goals, and having the
capability in place to support full-rate production.
Today, GaN is mature and Qorvo has seen its GaN volumes increase due to
commercial demand for the material for everything from cable television to
cell phone towers. That increase in demand has enabled the DoD "to go in
and buy wafers out of that [production line] and it drives the cost down very
significantly", Bruce said.
"A typical radar might be less than a month's worth of production in one of
these foundries and the rest of their production is driven by commercial," he
said. "It is essentially the same technology. At Lockheed [Martin] we very
much want commercial pull because if you have a process that only supports
DoD, DoD just does not have enough flow through the factory, enough
volume to keep doing it over and over again, so that you keep getting good
at it and you stay good at it."
Not only did Lockheed Martin get a good price for its Space Fence power
amplifiers, but all of the company's GaN power amplifiers were delivered by
the end of August 2015.
"We are just ramping up production for the whole radar. There are many,
many components we have not received yet, but all of our GaN power amps,
all that production, [is] done and will be stored in our factory at Moorestown
[New Jersey] waiting to be packaged and placed on LRUs [Line Replaceable
Units]," Bruce said.
Besides Space Fence and 3DELRR, Lockheed Martin is also doing a
tremendous amount of activity in GaN with S-band, Bruce added.
"We have some GaN radar technology in an X-band radar product
under development. We are going across in the radar domain across all
frequencies. This could even drive up into Ku-band. GaN is being looked at
in any place where you need high efficiency and high power," he said.
"If you are at real low power then GaAs may be okay, but if you are getting
into any kind of high power then you are looking at GaN."
The other area where Lockheed Martin is using GaN extensively is in

electronic warfare (EW). The company is taking advantage of GaN's high

power and broadband capability.
Another area GaN is being used is to counter-improvised explosive devices
(C-IEDs). These systems need broadband high-power transmitters that are
efficient because those systems are limited by the prime power that is
available on vehicles or in the batteries that power man-portable systems,
Bruce noted.
Tens of thousands of C-IED systems - in which most of the power amplifiers
are GaN - have been purchased by the United States and international
militaries.
Besides improvements in capability, GaN has also proven reliable, Bruce
added.
"We have done extensive lifecycle testing on GaN and one of the amazing
things to me is that the field effect transistors that make up a GaN power
amplifier ... we can't make them fail. The reliability is so good that in Space
Fence, even after operating [for] 20 years, we may never see a failure,"
Bruce said. "Think about it, you build solid-state radars because you get
built-in fault tolerance because I can have an amplifier that fails, but my
radar continues to work. But when you do the math, based on the reliability
predictions, the reliability is so good [that] other than some catastrophic
event we actually may not see any failures. We have done things to try and
get the amplifiers to fail and they won't fail."
With GaN reaching a level of maturity that made it acceptable and desirable,
the services therefore, wanted it for new radar programmes and companies
began replacing GaAs in existing systems, such as the USMC's Ground/Air
Task Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) and the US Army's Patriot Missile Defense
system.
After taking delivery of the first two systems in early 2014, the USMC
bought four additional AN/TPS-80s in October 2014. The initial two radars
used GaAs transmit/receive (T/R) modules. Northrop Grumman would equip
all the follow-on systems with GaN.
On 25 August 2015, the USMC announced it was awarding Northrop
Grumman USD9 million to incorporate Phase II of the GaN transition of the

G/ATOR low-rate initial production systems.

Replacing GaAs with GaN is just a matter of unplugging one and plugging
in the other. In fact, Northrop Grumman had actually mixed and matched
GaAs and GaN T/R modules on the same aperture.
In June 2014 Raytheon said it had successfully demonstrated its Patriot radar
equipped with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) and GaN. The
GaN-based AESAs were proposed to give the radar a 360 surveillance
capability.
In February 2015 the US government approved international sales of
Raytheon's new AESA/GaN-equipped Patriot radar system.
At the same time, the USAF was developing 3DELRR, which required the
use of GaN. Raytheon was doing the same for its bid for the USN's Air
Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class
destroyers.
"We put in GaN because the radar hull study for maritime ships required a
certain sensitivity, which required a certain power aperture for ships," Tad
Dickenson, Raytheon's AMDR programme manager, told IHS Jane's .
"In order to fit it on the ship, within the power budget of the ship, and the
weight budget of the ship you needed a high-performing, high-power semiconductor," Dickenson said.
GaAs was going to be hard to fit within the size and weight. Additionally, it
was nowhere near as efficient as a lower voltage semi-conductor, he said.
"That is why we selected GaN for this application."
GaN is a wideband gap semi-conductor so it has a higher voltage
breakdown, which provides AMDR a higher power density on the radio
frequency (RF) MIMIC amplifiers that Raytheon builds. Along with GaN's
high temperature capability, it enables Raytheon to create a high-power
radar aperture and run it at high duty cycles, Dickenson said.
"For AMDR, which is an IAMD [Integrated Air and Missile Defense] radar,
it allows us to achieve what we call very high radar occupancy per mission,"
he said. "We have to do simultaneous integrated air and simultaneous BMD

[Ballistic Missile Defense] and we have to run those all the time and have
the power aperture to do that within the time frame. GaN allows us to do
that."
With a high power density semi-conductor, fewer T/R modules and less
support circuitry is needed, driving down cost. That was another reason
Raytheon selected GaN.
"I would need fewer of these radar module assemblies to create the same
capable radar," Dickenson said.
Even though GaN has been under development for a decade, many in the
defence industry and the DoD believe the technology has a long road ahead.
"We believe GaN still has a lot of room to run. What we developed on GaN
on the Wide Band Gap Semi-conductors [WBGS] programme, which ran
through [the] early 2000s, was a baseline technology capability," said Daniel
Green, programme manager for DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office
(MTO).
"The value proposition for GaN was very well established and that is why
you are seeing it roll out now into established large 'programmes of record'
systems like AMDR and next-generation jammer," he said. "But if you look
at the fundamental materials capabilities there is still a lot of untapped
potential there."
DARPA has done a lot of work to open up that potential and create different
variants based on the same fundamental material system that gives the
agency different capabilities.
"In particular one fundamental thing GaN gives us is that you can run the
transistors at higher power densities. The reason they are limited on current
applications is due to the thermal load that that generates," Green said. "You
can only run them to a certain temperature and so that limits the electrical
power density that you are able to apply."
DARPA currently has the Intrachip/Interchip Enhanced Cooling (ICECool)
programme within MTO. Green described it as an "effort to integrate
cooling systems with the device technology such that you can unlock some
of that latent electrical performance by having a better cooling process".

According to DARPA, "ICECool seeks to overcome the limitations of

remote cooling. ICECool will explore embedded thermal management by
bringing microfluidic cooling inside the substrate, chip, or package and by
including thermal management in the earliest stages of electronics design.
Success with ICECool may help close the gap between chip-level heat
generation density and system-level heat removal density in highperformance electronic systems, such as computers, RF electronics, and
solid-state lasers."
Another programme Green oversees is the Nitride Electronic NeXtGeneration Technology (NeXt), which is focused on developing the next
generation of GaN technology.
"What we have done is applied the lessons from silicon transistor scaling to
GaN and so that is about making scaled versions of GaN transistors that
were established in the WBGS programme to much finer gate pitches and
lines, pushing the frequency performance up," he said. "So the typical
technology that came out of the WBGS programme is a 0.25 micron gate
links capability and we have been pushing that down by an order of
magnitude with the NeXt programme taking us from frequencies in the 2-10
GHz, which is relevant for most radar and communications systems today
and pushing it up to where we can operate them in the hundreds of GHz."
DARPA was able to dramatically improve the efficiency, which it could
operate an amplifier at - the low frequency - by leveraging the technology
that is designed for operation at high frequency, Green said.
DARPA is exploring applications where it could apply NeXt, he added.
Another DARPA programme is the Microscale Power Conversion, that is
looking at scaling the GaN transistors for high-frequency operation.
"We are re-optimising them for power switching at higher frequencies than
normal. The idea is that you are now coupling the RF amplifier to the power
supply design. The reason you want to do that is for the complex waveforms
associated with communications systems. It is very hard to create amplifiers
that can handle those complex waveforms with high efficiency. If you are
able to leverage the dynamic capabilities of GaN you can dramatically
increase the efficiency of those amplifiers," Green said. "We are leveraging

the integration of those GaN power switches to the GaN RF amplifiers to

create very high efficiency broadband communications devices."
Historically, the costs to produce GaN were high, as they was driven by the
size of the silicon carbide, which is the material used for the substrate upon
which the GaN is grown, Green said.
"But the key benefit of WBGS was pushing the volumes up, which enabled
the diameter expansion of [the] silicon carbide wafer and the volumes to
improve. That has driven down the cost," he said. "If you look at what it cost
to produce these materials today it is on [a] par with other compound semiconductor materials and the material differential is relatively minor at this
point."
Qorvo has been working with GaN for about 15 years and was one of the
early pioneers in developing the technology, James Klein, president of
Infrastructure and Defense Products for Qorvo, told IHS Jane's .
The company is now manufacturing thousands of wafers a week, he added.
"This is really a great time for GaN; we see it coming together. There is a
significant demand in the commercial and defence side. The commercial
customers benefit from advanced technologies that come out of our defence
work and then our defence customers benefit from commercial volumes,"
Klein said.
Qorvo has put capital in place for new manufacturing processes for
transitioning from GaAs to GaN, but for Qorvo the challenge was learning
how to manufacture the technology. "We are through all of that. The yields
for GaN in [fabrication] today are equivalent or better than GaAs," he said.
"We manufacture GaN on our GaAs line. Obviously there is some special
equipment on our production line but there is some level of commonality in
the two devices."
Defence customers, however, commonly ask for a higher level of screening
and inspection, but the manufacturing processes are the same, he added.
The company builds a broad range of technologies covering low UHF-type
frequencies up into high millimeter wavelengths.

Klein expects to see the market for defence GaN wafers grow. Qorvo also
has a significant international presence that is also seeing demand for GaN
increase.
"As for growth rates this market on the defence side will grow in the mid
20% [more or less]. The commercial side is not far off that," Klein said.
Qorvo, as a whole, has more than 50% of its revenues from international
sales, Klein added. "A good part of that is in the defence world."
Just like the defence customers who buy GaN wafers from Qorvo, Klein
acknowledges the advantages of GaN over GaAs for a lot of applications
because of its ability to produce higher levels - about 10 times - of output
power for its size.
"We have maximised that GaN performance by our silicon carbide carrier,
which is what most folks use, and the reason is because silicon carbide is a
great thermal conductor," Klein said. "You have this very small device that
has a tremendous amount of output power. The key is to get the heat away
from the device and silicon carbide allows us to do that very, very
effectively."
Qorvo has an active research programme, partnering with DARPA and the
USN's Office of Naval Research (ONR). One example is work being done
on thermal management with GaN on man-made diamonds.
Diamond as a material is a WBGS. It is similar to GaN; it has a slightly
wider band gap and superior conductivity, said Green.
"When people talk about diamond they are talking about synthetic diamond,
so we make the material through crystal growth techniques," he said.
Investment in synthetic diamond preceded investment in GaN, so engineers
have known for a long time that the thermal conductivity would be a natural
fit for creating high power electronics, Green noted.
"It has some semi-conductor capability, but to date the evidence has not
shown it is able to get to the same performance levels that we can do with
other materials, so that is why we have focused on things like GaN.

"That being said the thermal conductivity is still unsurpassed so there is

going to be this recurrence where we come back to it and see if we can
figure out a better way to seek out performance from that material system,"
Green said.
DARPA does have a programme called Near Junction Thermal Transport
(NJTT) that was looking at integrating thermal layers into GaN and other
devices. NJTT is in the same vein as ICECool in terms of managing the
thermal loads.
"A lot of the programme was related to the integration of diamond sub
mounts," Green said. "There are a lot of other interesting materials that have
come on the scene in the last several years that are part of that conversation
as well, such as complex oxides. It has not been a broad investment for
DARPA, but it is something we continue to look at in discussions of future
efforts."
Northrop Grumman is exploring advanced concepts and technologies
beyond GaN, Tom Jones, vice-president and general manager of advanced
concepts and technologies for Northrop Grumman advanced systems, told
IHS Jane's .
"I think there are some very exciting things coming in terms of very high
levels of integration down at the device level. We do research and
development anywhere in the domain of RF systems, where we think we can
provide discriminating technology from performance or affordability
standpoints, or hopefully usually both of those," he said. "In the past we
have looked at materials. We also do a fair amount of work with silicongermanium [SiGe]. It gives you some advantages of getting high levels of
integration in RF circuitry."
Northrop Grumman also does some work in the device level, looking at low
loss switches, high linearity mixers, carbon nanotubes, and at the integrated
circuit-microelectronics standpoint as well.
"An area that is probably getting the highest level of interest right now is this
move to much higher integration. A lot of this is being enabled by SiGe,
which has given the ability to literally take multiple chips per channel and
turn it into multiple channels per chip with the ability to mix RF and digital
CMOS [complementary metal-oxide semi-conductor] on the same device,"

Jones said. "If you couple that with advances and FPGAs [fieldprogrammable gate arrays] and analog to digital converters, we are now
actually seeing us move toward the ability to do direct digital conversion and
DAPRA has a contract on this."