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Alex Lidow of EPC, El Segundo, CA, is claiming the end of silicon with a new form of gallium nitride the company is producing. His credentials look very impressive and I am looking for any input on this subject. I will do more research on this myself when time permits.
In my opinion, GaN will not be a wholesale replacement for Si. Si plateaus all right, but at a very high level. There will be applications for GaN, but I don't see it being used to create SOCs, microprocessors, or even most analog chips for that matter.
Alex Lidow of EPC, El Segundo, CA, is claiming the end of silicon with a new form of gallium nitride the company is producing. His credentials look very impressive and I am looking for any input on this subject. I will do more research on this myself when time permits.
This story brings back old memories. Specifically, it brings back the day in 1973 when Leo Esaki won the Nobel. I was walking through Kasumigaseki, ran into a friend who was all excited about a Japanese Nobelist, and he wanted me to tell him two things, What the hell was a Josephson junction, and how long would it take for gallium nitride to take over the world?
I'm not saying these guys are wrong. But it's one of those stories like the End of Moore's Law. Yeah, well...
I suspect that the rise of the galliums will be hidden in the middle of a dozen other developments, and a generation from now we'll notice, entirely retrospectively, that somewhere back there we used less and less silicon without quite noticing because that hadn't been the most interesting part of the stories.
