Diverse & Accessible Heterogeneous Integration (DAHI)
Abstract
The scaling of silicon (Si) transistors to ever smaller dimensions has led to dramatic gains in processor performance over the past fifty years. In parallel, integrated circuit (IC) designers for radio frequency (RF) circuits have leveraged the different material properties of compound semiconductor (CS) technologies such as indium phosphide (InP), gallium arsenide (GaAs), gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon-germanium (SiGe) to enable devices that operate at frequencies and powers difficult or impossible to achieve in Silicon. Historically, a designer would have to decide between the high density of Si circuits or the high performance of CS materials. Prior DARPA efforts have demonstrated the ability to achieve near-ideal "mix-and-match" capability for DoD circuit designers with limited demonstrations of the heterogeneous integration of silicon and InP technologies that far exceeded what can be accomplished with one technology alone. Specifically, the Compound Semiconductor Materials On Silicon (COSMOS) program enabled transistors of InP to be freely mixed with silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits to obtain the benefits of both technologies (very high speed and very high circuit complexity/density, respectively). The Diverse & Accessible Heterogeneous Integration (DAHI) effort will take this capability to the next level, ultimately offering the seamless co-integration of a variety of semiconductor devices (for example, GaN, InP, GaAs, antimonide based Compound Semiconductors), microelectromechanical (MEMS) sensors and actuators, photonic devices (e.g., lasers, photo-detectors) and thermal management structures. This capability will revolutionize our ability to build true "systems on a chip" (SoCs) and allow dramatic size, weight and volume reductions while enabling higher performance such as power, bandwidth or dynamic range in our electronic systems for electronic warfare, communications and radar. This program has applied research efforts funded in PE 0602716E, Project ELT-01. The Advanced Technology Development part of this program will leverage these complementary efforts to focus on the establishment of an accessible, manufacturable technology for device-level heterogeneous integration of a wide array of materials and devices (including, for example, multiple electronics and MEMS technologies) with complex silicon-enabled (e.g. CMOS) architectures on a common silicon substrate platform. This part of the program is expected to culminate in accessible foundry processes of DAHI technology and demonstrations of advanced microsystems with innovative architectures and designs that leverage heterogeneous integration. By the end of the program, this effort seeks to establish a technologically mature, sustainable DAHI foundry service to be made available (with appropriate computer-aided design support) to a wide variety of DoD laboratory, Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC), academic and industrial designers.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2017
- Source ID
- 22ec92cd18f58f780f7278ee0c312fbf