Motorola's New Technology for Faster and Cheaper Chips

Geez, those guys at Motorola are busy folks. Didn't we just hear about the company's Ultra Violet Photomasks yesterday ? Well, the company has even more up its sleeve with yet another announcement of new technology that could change the semiconductor industry. Motorola Labs scientists say they just successfully combined the properties of silicon technology with the speed and optical capabilities of high-performance compound semiconductors that are known as III-V materials. The technology enables very thin layers of so-called III-V semiconductor materials (which include gallium arsenide, indium phosphide, gallium nitride and other high performance/light-emitting compounds) to be grown on a silicon substrate. Until now, Motorola says there has been no way to combine light-emitting semiconductors with silicon integrated circuits on a single chip, and that the need to use discrete components has affected the cost, size, speed, and efficiency of high-speed communications equipment and devices. The problem with combining the two types of substrates is that the underlying crystalline structures of silicon and III-V compounds don't like each other. Attempts to combine them resulted in cracks in the material as the two structures attempted to bond. To solve the problem, Motorola introduced an intermediate layer of material between the silicon and the III-V material that would bond to both and then found the two warring substrates worked together quite nicely. Share: