Innovative Technologies Supporting Affordable Increases in Power, Efficiency, and Bandwidth for Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) X-Band Radars

This Phase-I STTR MDA Proposal proposes the use of a new class of diamond-seeded solid-state material system for the manufacture of virtually all heat-generating solid-state electronics in X-band and Ballistic Missile Defense radar components and systems. In this proposal wherein much preliminary (DARPA- and MDA-funded) work has been demonstrated hitherto by the authors, all or most of the basic semiconductor devices in an electronic RF unit (e.g. GaN HEMTs, Power Amplifiers, etc.) are replaced with Semiconductor-on-Diamond based devices to enable nearly total and immediate heat extraction from the device’s active region. A 4” Gallium Nitride-on-Diamond will be demonstrated for the first time here. Polycrystalline free standing CVD diamond – nature’s most efficient thermal conductor – enables nearly perfect heat extraction from a “hot” device, owing to the extreme thermal conductivity of diamond (GaAs, Si, and SiC are 35W/m/K, 150W/m/K and 390W/m/K respectively; diamond ranges from 1200-2000 W/m/K depending on quality). In the proposed scheme, the device’s active epitaxial layers are removed from their original host substrate and transferred to a specially treated low-cost CVD diamond substrate using a proprietary low-cost manufacturable scheme. The semiconductor-on-diamond technology proposed here may be applied to Si, GaAs, GaN, SiC, SiGe, etc. at up to 8” in wafer diameter.