High Power Vacuum GaN

The Phase I solicitation asked for novel approaches to power output stages in Transmit/Receive(T/R) modules fabricated from GaN or other wide bandgap semiconductor materials, leading to increased power and efficiency or decreased transmission line loss with proof-of-principle demonstrations or models based on open source X-Band Radar parameters. The SMD/MIT team responded with an innovative high power vacuum GaN (HPV-GaN) device which incorporates a vacuum emitter in a GaN FET. This allows the anode/drain voltage of the device to be increased by as much as 10 times over what is possible now and the anode to be moved away from the semiconductor channel, leading to compact devices with exceptional power added efficiency and substantial improvements in thermal management for X-band radar systems. This technology can be used with any of the GaN materials or process improvements being developed elsewhere, including HEMT structures; the vacuum emitter is essentially a power booster and thermal management approach to raise any given GaN technology to new performance levels.