19 Dec GaN Process Design Kit

GaN PROCESS DESIGN KIT

OMMIC releases GaN Process Design Kit with support for Keysight’s ADS Electro-Thermal Analysis

OMMIC’s Gallium Nitride (GaN) Process Design Kit (PDK) supports the ADS Electro-Thermal Simulator from Keysight Technologies. Through this capability, OMMIC offers its MMIC designers accurate simulation results including the dynamic effect of temperature and temperature gradient across the die, a key factor when developing designs using a High-Power process, leading them to a successful design and a reliable product.

OMMIC’s GaN Process using High Resistivity Silicon substrate is dedicated to microwave and millimeter wave applications, including high Power Amplifiers (PA), robust Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA) and multifunction chips such as required for 5G systems. The main scope of this process is to propose the same noise figure, gain and cut-off frequency than a 130 nm p-HEMT process, but with a much higher breakdown voltage, output power and LNA robustness. State of the art, 10 W Q-band power amplifier, 1.5 dB noise figure Ka-band low noise amplifier and Q-band Transceiver/Receiver chip have already been demonstrated.

Increasing power densities require designers to pay a lot of attention to temperatures across their circuit. OMMIC’s PDK already includes self-heating models, but with this new feature, it is now possible to take into account the thermal coupling between devices without requiring any extraction of thermal parameters.

Additionally, the designer can also simulate the effect of heat transfer from the die to the package using this feature. The designer simply needs to add an ElectroThermal Simulation Controller to his existing circuit and run his simulation. Device temperatures are automatically computed and a 3D temperature profile of the die is displayed at the end of the simulation. The ElectroThermal Solver is fully integrated with the Keysight ADS environment, and there is no need to manually transfer data between different tools.

“This new feature has been developed in close collaboration with Keysight EEsof, and thus benefits from full compatibility with latest Keysight ADS release and has been optimized for OMMIC’s GaN technology”, said Julien Poulain, PDK Development and Modeling Engineer at OMMIC.
“This is a big milestone in our collaboration with OMMIC” said Kevin Dhawan, Foundry Program Manager with Keysight EEsof EDA. “Based on a full 3-D thermal solver tightly integrated with ADS circuit simulation and IC layout environment, this solution provides more accurate ‘thermally-aware’ results which include the effect of on-chip temperature rise, and thus help designers uncover potential reliability issues and failures very early in the design cycle.”

If you would like to try out this new feature, contact us and we will provide you access to the design kits section of our website.

———————————-

ABOUT OMMIC

Created in 2000 by spinning off Philipps, OMMIC specializes in the development and manufacturing of microwave circuits. OMMIC focusses on III – V technologies (GaN, GaAs and InP) and made the strategic choice to locate all its activities in France, on the historic site of Limeil-Brévannes, investing heavily in research. Today, OMMIC is the world leader in millimetric GaN technology, with superior power and unparalleled energy efficiency technology. The company is positioned to be one of the pillars of millimetric 5G. More information is available at www.ommic.com

———————————-

ABOUT KEYSIGHT TECHNOLOGIES

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) is a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight’s solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets. Keysight generated revenues of $3.9B in fiscal year 2018. More information is available at www.keysight.com