PRESENTATION
Advancing GaN Power Technologies: Scaling to 300 mm for the AI Era
Over the past decade, imec has been supporting the power semiconductor industry with the enablement of GaN technologies offering a comprehensive industrial affiliation program to mutualize R&D efforts and licensing the intellectual property generated within and outside its partner consortium. These efforts spent on 200mm from the start resulted in the availability of 200V/650V and 40V/100V p-GaN HEMT technology platforms soon complemented with their monolithic integration derivatives based on Resistor Transistor Logic and built on Silicon or SOI with Deep Trench Isolation allowing GaN Power Integrated Circuits to be designed. The ongoing Artificial Intelligence revolution is reshaping data centers and compute system architectures. New power semiconductor technologies are needed to manage the increased power fueling this new era. In this context, imec is expanding its portfolio of GaN power technologies towards lower and higher voltage ratings to address the overall power conversion chain as well as moving to 300mm to aggressively scale device dimensions and to benefit from the most advanced processing tool capabilities.
Pierre Gassot
imec
Pierre Gassot received a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in solid state physics from the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France respectively in 1992 and 1997. From 1998 till 2000, he worked at Alcatel Microelectronics in Belgium as project leader on non-volatile memories embedded in smart power technologies. In 2001, he coordinated integration activities on advanced CMOS and BiCMOS for Alcatel Microelectronics in collaboration with foundries in Taiwan. From 2002 till 2007, he worked at AMIS Belgium as team leader for the development of non-volatile memories as well as on the enhancement of smart power technologies towards integrated power switching applications. In 2008, he received a Master of Business and Administration from the Vlerick Business School in Belgium. Later on that year, he joined ON Semiconductor Belgium as project leader to drive advanced BCD R&D activities and became in 2011 manager of the integration and characterization team in charge of the development of Low, Medium and High Voltage Silicon MOSFET’s as well as of D-Mode and E-Mode GaN HEMT technologies. From 2018 to early 2022, he headed the Corporate R&D department of ON Semiconductor Belgium in charge of GaN technology development and of supporting activities on SiC MOSFET’s. Since then, he has been heading the business development team for Specialty and GaN Power at imec Leuven.