Motorola unveils semiconductor technology

Motorola yesterday revealed it has developed a new semiconductor material that will significantly lower costs associated with the deployment of optical and wireless applications, including fiber to the home and video streaming to mobile phones.

Still unnamed, the technology involves coating a wafer of silicon—the readily available, standard material used in most computer chips—with gallium arsenide, a material used for high-performance optical transmissions that is significantly more expensive and much less durable than silicon. Previous attempts to bond the two materials have failed, because their atomic structures are incompatible.

But Motorola researchers resolved this problem by creating a material that bonds to both gallium arsenide and silicon. With this buffer, Motorola believes the cost of gallium arsenide-based components will be reduced dramatically, which may give some advanced applications an opportunity to become economically viable.

“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 technology. In addition, the ability to put gallium arsenide—used in radio-frequency components—on the same wafer as silicon processing creates several advantages for next-generation mobile applications, Warrior said. By integrating these functions on a single chip, future handsets can provide significantly more functionality without increasing power usage or heat generation, she said.

“Definitely, the inability to combine these different materials on the same chip has been a limitation until now,” Warrior said. “They tended to be two different worlds. It certainly opens the door in our thinking of ‘Gee, if that restriction is not there, how would I go about designing the chip?’”

Motorola has filed more than 270 patents for the technology, which it plans to license. Prototype chips are expected to be available by the end of 2002, Warrior said.