Wolfspeed of Research Triangle Park, NC, USA – a Cree Company that makes silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) wide-bandgap semiconductor devices – says that, as of the end of 2015, it had shipped gallium nitride on silicon carbide (GaN-on-SiC) RF power transistors with a combined RF output power of more than 1.3GW. Wolfspeed achieved this while maintaining a failure-in-time rate (FIT rate) of 5-per-billion device hours.
"Wolfspeed's achievement, exceeding 100 billion total hours of field operation for GaN-on-SiC devices, is the largest known body of fielded data accumulated by any domestic GaN supplier to date, and includes not only discrete transistors, but complex multi-stage GaN MMICs as well," says RF & microwave director Jim Milligan. "Our production numbers reflect the increasingly widespread adoption of GaN-on-SiC RF technology in military and aerospace systems, telecom base-stations, wideband test equipment, civil radar, and medical applications."
For comparison, 1.3GW is the same power output as the energy required to power all of the LED street lights in Los Angeles for 22 years, or enough to power more than 124,900 USA residential homes for a year.
