Gallium arsenide digital integrated circuits

• DOI: 10.1007/bf02744867
• Publication Date: 2007-11-10T09:36:36Z
• Authors: D Bhattacharya
• Keywords: MESFET; Gigabit

The motivations behind the development of GaAs integrated circuits (IC) are two-fold: to integrate high speed logic with optical sources and to meet the increasing demand of realising LSI/VLSI with higher speed and lower power dissipation for large scale computer applications. GaAs gigabit circuits have been growing in complexity to more than 3000 gates on a single chip. Although this is encouraging, more efforts are needed to improve production yield. By far the most work on GaAs digital IC has been done using MESFET as the active devices. MOSFET technology is yet to mature from the practical IC point of view. The logic gate types used in circuits are predominantly of the enhancement-mode driver and depletion-mode load configuration (E/D).