GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

Proposals should focus on novel applications in higher frequency bands (Ku, Ka and above, provided these upper bands are progressively enabled by the new GaN manufacturing process) and maturing the applications in the lower microwave bands (pursuing higher bandwidths, TX/RX integration, efficient thermal management, etc.). The proposed activities should in particular include:

• Activities to increase resilience and strengthening the security of supply of European SiC substrate and epitaxy. These are of prime importance to secure the supply chain for GaN military applications.
• Improvement of existing processing capabilities and development of new technologies for RF-devices and modules under industrial manufacturing conditions with regard to throughput, yield and costs.
• Investigations to gain a deeper understanding of physical effects limiting reliability and device degradation under military relevant operation conditions.
• Among the new emerging materials, technologies, processes and tools, the proposed activities can optionally include exploration, in the same study, of benefits of other materials in comparison to GaN on SiC.
• Detailed investigation of the appropriate GaN processes for the specific applications and target frequency bands in order to face related challenges in terms of achieving a sufficiently high output power, efficiency etc. within a small device area, especially when moving up in frequency.
• The design, building and testing of GaN MMIC technological demonstrators for different frequency bands and applications with the aim to demonstrate the capacity of the new technologies in terms of power efficiency, linearity and time recovery. Investigation, design and analysis of novel structures and topologies for the MMIC design, in order to fulfil the requirements for high-end defence applications such as but not limited to AESA, EW, robust communication systems, SatCom.
• Investigation of new methods for packaging, including low cost plastic packaging and heterogeneous integration of GaN MMICs with other active technologies (BiCMOS, SiGe, CMOS, GaAs) and passive technologies (combiners, circulators, filters) in a same package.
• Assessment of Wafer based Level Packaging (WLP) technology applied to RF sensors SiP.
• Development of complements to make the WLP technology compliant with defence specifications for 2D and 3D integration.