HRL Receives Phase II Contract for COSMOS Program
Source/Type: News - Staff reports

Author: CompoundSemi News Staff

June 15, 2009... HRL Laboratories, LLC, of Malibu, California USA, reported that it has received a Phase II, 18-month contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue its work on the compound semiconductor materials on silicon (COSMOS) program. HRL says that the goal of the DARPA/Air Force Research Laboratory program is to develop new methods to integrate compound semiconductor technologies with complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits in order to achieve high performance such as high-dynamic-range (16 bits), high-bandwidth (500 MHz). It will also reportedly offer analog-to-digital conversion for challenging RF receiver applications, such as communications, radar and sensor systems.

HRL announced in December 2008 at the IEEE's International Electron Device Meeting in San Francisco that it had successfully integrated silicon CMOS with indium phosphide (InP) double heterojunction bipolar transistors (DHBTs), thus completing phase 1 of the project which started in 2007. The company says it expects the innovation will result in higher bandwidth and lower distortion signals for optical and RF communications. Phase II of the program will focus on significantly improving both the yield and density of the heterogeneous interconnect process using the HRL 400 GHz, 250 nm InP HBT process combined with commercial 130 nm CMOS. The program has a target of producing a 500 MHz bandwidth digital-to-analog converter with 13-bit dynamic range at the rated bandwidth. Company News Release

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