Modern electronic products, from computers to smart phones, use silicon chips at their heart. As the name suggests, these chips are made from silicon, which is a highly abundant element found in sand.

With a single element, it is possible to scale-up the manufacturing process to make highly complex silicon chips in large volumes, and hence 80% of the world’s semiconductors use silicon.

The remaining 20% use compound semiconductors, which combine two or more elements from the periodic table to form a compound. For example, silicon (Si) and carbon (C) form silicon-carbide (SiC).

Although compound semiconductors are more complex to manufacture than silicon, they possess 3 properties that outperform silicon:

• Power (power electronics for electric vehicles)
• Speed (radio frequency for 5G and RADAR)
• Light (photonics for optical fibre communications)

This is why CSA Catapult has three matching technical divisions, supported by Advanced Packaging. Those are Power Electronics, Photonics and RF & Microwave.

There are many ways of combining two or more elements from the periodic table, which creates a wide variety of semiconductor materials, each with unique properties.

Some of the more common compound semiconductors include: gallium-arsenide (GaAs), gallium-nitride (GaN), silicon carbide (SiC), indium-phosphide (InP) and even aluminium-gallium-indium-phosphide (AlGaInP).

Their unique properties mean that compound semiconductors are finding increasingly diverse applications, such as:

• Electric vehicles: range extension requires highly efficient SiC.
• 5G: GaN chips provide high speed data links for 5G.