Gallium arsenide monolithic microwave integrated circuits in IBM

The activities at IBM Owego to design and manufacture gallium arsenide (GaAs) monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) for electronic support measure (ESM) microwave receivers are reviewed. The process, circuit design concepts and elements, and completed integrated circuits with results are described. The number of circuit design iterations involving actual wafer fabrication can be significantly reduced, often to one iteration, by the use of accurate design modeling. Much time is spent checking the correlation between predicted and measured results of basic circuit elements such as FETs, coils, capacitors, resistors, diodes, and microwave transmission lines. Often the coupling between these elements is important because of the close spacing required from small size. Once these models are proven to be accurate and realistic, it is then a simple and quick process to use them in the CAD program to generate many different circuit functions. Once the active and passive element models are complete, predictable integrated circuits are readily constructed. The finished devices are mounted in gold plated kovar packages to form more complex higher level functions.<>