General Competition (November 1993)

GaAs Super Microprocessor Technology Development

Sponsor: Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation

• Project Performance Period: 3/1/1994 - 12/31/1996
• Total project (est.): $8,324,896.00
• Requested ATP funds: $2,000,000.00

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, considerable research was done to develop gallium arsenide (GaAs) to substitute for silicon as the base material for integrated circuits. GaAs integrated circuits perform two to three times better than equivalent silicon ICs. While a number of commercial GaAs devices have been marketed, silicon has managed to hold its own because much more complex, densely populated circuits can be built in silicon. State-of-the-art silicon ICs feature more than 2,000,000 transistors per device, whereas the largest GaAs devices are more than 10 times smaller. As a result, several GaAs chips must be used to equal the capacity of a single giant silicon chip, and much of the performance advantage of the GaAs is lost in delays between the chips. The single biggest obstacle to denser, more highly integrated GaAs chips is power dissipation -- GaAs logic circuits are very fast, but consume much more power than silicon logic. In fact, current GaAs circuits consume considerable power while they aren't doing anything, while static silicon transistors consume essentially no power. Vitesse, a leader in commercial digital GaAs devices, proposes to develop the necessary GaAs technology to build very large, very high-speed GaAs static RAM (over 512 kilobit, under 2 nanosecond) and lower power (under 10 microwatt) logic gates. For comparison, the current state-of-the-art is 64-100 kilobit SRAM, and 150 microwatt gates. Success in this project would make it feasible to build highly integrated, 64-bit GaAs microprocessors with a 500 megahertz clock rate. This in turn would make it possible to put the power of today's multimillion-dollar supercomputers into a high-performance workstation costing perhaps half a million dollars.

For project information:

Ira Deyhimy, (805) 388-7511

ATP Project Manager

Eric Samuelson, (301) 975-6393
eric.samuelson@nist.gov