CompoundSemi Online - The Original Compound Semiconductor Industry Newspaper

May 22, 2002...In the advanced semiconductor field, where progress is so dynamic that most print magazines trying to cover the latest innovations appear discouragingly out of date by the time they appear all shiny off off those expensive presses and travel the snailmail post (only to find their way more and more frequently, unread and in the dark archives or worse yet, the trash bin) one print magazine consistently stands out with its unfailing ability to attract truly sterling contributed articles. That's IEEE Spectrum and their May issue is a definite keeper. Just look for the cover picture of a man's flexed arm muscle and the title, The Toughest Transistor Yet. It's all about our beloved Gallium Nitride (GaN), with heavy emphasis on the electronic vs the photonic side of GaN development. The article is authored by two of the compound semi industry's true academic gurus and nitride pioneers, Les Eastman of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York USA) and Umesh Mishra of the University of California at Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, California USA). These are two of the most amicable, most brilliant professors in our field. If you have the hardcopy of the actual magazine handy, read the article for yourself. If not, you can easily access it online. My advice is to use whatever communication conduits you favor and get word of this article out and around to anyone and everyone. In my opinion, this is the definitive source on GaN electronic development work, which, also in my opinion, is indeed the most promising of all the compound semiconductor materials. Not only will it make a good reference for those of you actually having to cite facts and figures (including figures of merit), but if we could spread the word about GaN, it might help generate the critical mass needed to provide the broadband sector with the lifeline it needs to pull out of its current slump. As Les and Umesh underscore in their close: "If there is an elixir for the go-anywhere, do-anythihg future envisioned for broadband wireless, it is this continually surprising semiconductor, with a bandgap big enough to see through."

While our readers are up to speed on GaN, because they're either making the news themselves or reading about it daily in these pages, we feel it's especially important and praiseworthy that mainstream tech magazines like IEEE Spectrum elected to give GaN the cover. Thanks IEEE! Our hope is that it will help inspire publishers and their reporters in the mainstream business and general press to pick up the thread and give our GaN people the respect they deserve. And since we're obviously the base source where a growing number of journalists come for background and inspiration (helping out young journalists and/or those new to the compounds is one of our primary missions) allow me to take this opportunity to add a bit of color commentary on the authors of The Toughest Transistor Yet: Les Eastman and Umesh Mishra.

Les Eastman is a truly remarkable man. He has, and continues to inspire an incredible number of gifted technologists in our field. His students read like the Who's Who of the industry, and included in that prestigious alumni is Umesh Mishra, who has become himself one of the most noted and respected compound semi professors in our field. I remember many, many years ago when first meeting my friend Joe Jensen of HRL. Joe's professor had been Umesh Mishra and Joe was known in the 1980s as The Superfast Kid because of his ability to design extremely fast circuits in InP. While Joe is obviously grown up now (he's one of the stars in our InP 101 video) and he'll be hosting the next USA version of IPRM but he still yields turf to his revered professor, Umesh Mishra. And who taught Umesh? None other than Les Eastman himself. I personally met Les for the first time in 1993 in Washington DC at the 5th International Conference on SiC and Related Materials. We sat in a bistro over lunch and I showed him my then fledgling satirical saga called Startup which ran as a series, including cartoons, for a few years in Elsevier's III-Vs Review and over the original EE Times Online.

Les didn't laugh at my work, which barbed mercilessly at humorous historical turning points (upward and downward) in compound semi history as it was being made. They primarily poked fun at the USA government. "Why aren't you laughing?" I naively asked as he thumbed through the pile of already published and the then "yet-to-be published" cartoon strips, most of which related to the struggles of compound semi researchers and all of which he read carefully. He looked at me and said, simply, "Because they're so painfully true." Those words became deeply embedded in my mind from that day on as I knew I had the unique fortune to have tuned into the same wavelength as the great Les Eastman. For the next few years while the cartoons ran, I tried to poke fun, instead, at Silicon Valley antics... which was easier, less painful, not that close to home, and which many found genuinely funny. Perhaps I'll consider pulling them back out of the freezer and see if they're able to help thaw out some of today's gloom and doom. What Les' wavelength also helped excite was a passion for championing new technologies, like GaN, and the people who make them work. From then on, I searched even harder for better ways to promote truly leading edge compounds. If we have an editorial bias here at CompoundSemi News, it's helping promote especially promising startup ventures.

Illustrating how tightly knit the GaN club is and how academia fuels the field, RF Nitro was a spinout of Les' group at Cornell and was subsequently acquired by RF Micro Devices, thus allowing RFMD to move more quickly into GaN. Nitres, which was started as a spinout of UCSB by Umesh and fellow UCSB professors, including Steve Denbaars, was quickly acquired by Cree and thus bolstered Cree's GaN expertise. Nitronex, which is still independent, is viewed as a significant up and comer and has its roots, like Cree, in NCSU. There are many more and similar GaN success stories in the making at places like TDI, Cermet, Kyma, Crystal IS, and Astraulux. Longtime GaN professors all over the world are inspiring the next-gen Shuji Nakamura type innovative researchers and the work being done on bulk GaN is regarded as the most exciting thing in all of semiconductor land. Les and Umesh's article, which underscores Shuji's contributions (thus further grooming Shuji for what could well turn out to become a Nobel prize) cites the many outstanding startup efforts underway, and if you want to add to that list, just tap our "search" function and type in the keyword:"GaN". And many seriously owe their very existence to government contracts from agencies who not only believed the GaN story, they bought it. GaN is one area where taxpayers monies are, indeed, hard at work. Providing the synergistic platforms are the technical symposia, like ICSCRM, ICNS, etc... and academic organizations, like IEEE, that have the good sense to publish the works of our most famous pioneers, like Les and Umesh.

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