High-speed technologies based on III-V compound semiconductors at Fraunhofer IAF

At the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (IAF) III-V compound semiconductors are used in high speed technologies. Here we focus on GaN-based Monolithic Millimeter-Wave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) for applications in the frequency regime between 2 GHz and 100 GHz and on metamorphic HEMT based MMICs for frequencies spanning from 100 GHz up to 600 GHz. Both technologies rely on state of the art epitaxial growth of suitable HEMT structures which is also carried out at the institute. As examples for the maturity of these technologies a GaN-based two-stage power amplifier operating in V-band is described and for the metamorphic HEMT technology a 300 GHz chip set for THz imaging applications as well as a broad-band six-stage amplifier operating around 600 GHz are presented.