Motorola bonds chips' future

Motorola's development of a semiconductor material that could dramatically cut the costs of high-performance communications equipment has telecom observers excited about the potential impact on the evolution of optical and wireless technologies.

In both arenas, performance criteria preclude using silicon to build high-performance components. Instead, developers use gallium arsenide and other high-speed conducting materials. However, the cost of these materials is expensive — gallium arsenide costs 10 times as much as silicon — which can hamper deployment of next-generation optical and wireless equipment.

By using strontium titanate to bond to gallium arsenide and silicon — two materials that do not bond naturally — Motorola officials believe the cost of this equipment will be reduced dramatically, helping remove the economic barriers to cutting-edge technologies.

“It makes it more realistic for video over a cell phone… and fiber to the home,” said Padmasree Warrior, a Motorola corporate vice president leading the commercialization effort for the yet-unnamed technology.

While making existing components cheaper is significant, it is the longer-term prospect of a single chip integrating data-processing (within silicon) and high-performance transceiver capabilities (within gallium arsenide or other materials) that most excites industry observers.

This is especially applicable to the development of next-generation wireless devices, which promise high-speed processing capabilities. Motorola's material could help manufacturers overcome challenges related to space, power, cost and heat generation in mobile device design.

“You can have a power amplifier in gallium arsenide and, on the same chip, have your silicon baseband processor with all the computing power,” said Jeremey Donovan, principal analyst for Gartner Dataquest. “This will allow you to make even smaller, lower-power, lower-cost cellular phones.”

Everyone will have the opportunity to use the technology — at a price — because Motorola plans to license it. The first prototype chips will be available at the end of 2002, and the new material could be in devices as early as 2003.

Motorola also plans to apply this bonding agent to other high-performance materials such as indium phosphide, a material with tremendous conducting properties that is about 100 times more expensive than silicon. Motorola believes a chip made of indium phosphide silicon material could process information at speeds of more than 70 GHz — 35 times faster than the fastest processor available in commercial computers today.

Such quantum leaps may cause carriers to rethink the future design of their networks, Warrior said.

“If you think, ‘I can only have gallium arsenide at this cost’ and ‘I can only have silicon at this performance,’ then you are forced to drive to one solution. Maybe the performance is going to be so good with this chip that you don't need to have an all-optical network. We don't know yet.”