CIES Consortium

Industry-Academic Collaboration

Power Electronics Device Technology

R&D of GaN on Si power device technologies

Wide-bandgap materials such as SiC and GaN are paid much attentions as materials of next-generation power devices. Particularly, GaN has already been applied successfully to blue and white LEDs and now is being applied to high-frequency and high-power electron devices. Additionally, GaN is able to be grown on various kinds of substrates including sapphire, SiC and Si. Thus it has a possibility of heterogenous integration with other semiconductor devices.
The goal of this study is, therefore, to build a monolithic integration of GaN power devices with Si devices such as CMOS logic, sensor, RF frontend and so on, on commonly-used Si substrates. This ‘Gan on Si systems’ enable us to downsize the systems dramatically in comparison to the systems combining Si ICs and discrete GaN power devices. Moreover, enhanced performances and their reliability are also expected by reducing interconnections between each device in a module.
The Gan on Si power device systems will be a must-have technology in the future society implementing an intelligent transportation system with a high volume of EV/HV vehicles.