News on China's scientific and technological development.

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Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
antiterror13 said:
Would GaN fab be different that Si Fab ? How Chinese GaN chip manufacturing technology wise compared the the leading world ?
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Due to high transistor failure rate, GaN is used mainly on power ICs, which is used on things like power chargers. For military applications, they tend to be via boutique fabs, which means the fabs the defense companies themselves own like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. For China, that would be CETIC. For commercial use China is the leading manufacturer of the material but imports a lot of the GaN power circuit chips but this can be changing. Power circuits are not made with the leading edge fabs and the suppliers of power circuits tend to be firms you hardly hear of.

There is a partial list of GaN manufacturers in China here.

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krautmeister

krautmeister

Junior Member
Registered Member
antiterror13 said:
Would GaN fab be different that Si Fab ? How Chinese GaN chip manufacturing technology wise compared the the leading world ?
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As far as I know, GaN fabrication is very similar to Si. All the major components are similar such as photolithography, etching, deposition, cleaning, etc, etc. The main difference I am aware of is the wafer preparation. GaN wafers are generally prepared by using a substrate with a good lattice match like silicon carbide, sapphire or silicon. Silicon is almost always used as the substrate because it makes it easier to use processes that were created for silicon IC fabrication. Then an epitaxial layer of GaN is added via deposition to the substrate. From there, depending on the kind of chip being created, the wafer may be further treated with additional deposition layers or go straight to processing.

GaN has a much wider bandgap than Si and has a high thermal threshold. So, it's typically used for applications requiring power efficiency and/or high power and/or heat resistance. Applications like power conversion, RF components, amplifiers, radars, etc. These all use fully mature nodes no where near the leading edge or even the trailing edge.
 
Xizor

Xizor

Captain
Registered Member
Tyler said:
Because they did use the MIPS instruction set under license. Now that MIPS is practically dead all around the world except for China and Loongson. The new architecture appears to be an instruction superset of MIPS, like a new branch. So no surprise it would use MIPS instructions and libraries.
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This was posted here before.
I think LoongArch is fresh and not dependent on MIPS.
 
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