Research trends and future directions in ultra-high-speed compound semiconductor IC technology

The most prominent feature of compound semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) is their ultra-high-speed performance, The development of 10-Gbit/s ICs has almost been finished and the next stage aiming at 40 Gbit/s or more has been taken off. Such ultra-high-speed ICs require new types of interconnection and circuit design as well as improved transistor performance, For transistors, MESFETs, which have already been widely used, are making steady progress toward higher speed, intensive research is being performed on both GaAs-based and InP-based HFETs and HBTs, Transistor performance is pushing 200 GHz and ICs with speeds over 40 Gbit/s have been demonstrated, Three-dimensional interconnection with low loss and low interference has been proposed, A distributed configuration is becoming more important as a design technique.