Glenrothes-based Raytheon Systems is part of an international team that has been awarded a £3.45m contract by the US Office of Naval Research to develop integrated circuits for military systems.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding the contract as part of its Compound Semiconductor Materials on Silicon (COSMOS) programme.
The Raytheon-led team will integrate high-performance compound semiconductors with low-cost commercial complementary metal oxide semiconductor silicon (CMOS) wafers which they claim has cost to performance advantages over using either technology individually.
The other COSMOS team members are US companies Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), Teledyne Scientific Imaging Company, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Paradigm Research, IQE and Silicon Valley Technology Center, and French microelectronics company Soitec.
‘The objective is to develop a high-resolution analogue-to-digital converter with low power consumption,’ said Dr Katherine Herrick, Raytheon IDS programme manager. ‘However, the benefits of the programme go significantly beyond the specific objective. The processes lead to advanced low-cost analogue and digital, microwave and millimetre-wave integrated circuits with applications for next-generation radar, communications and electronic warfare systems.’
‘Our team's process of directly growing a compound semiconductor on a uniquely engineered silicon substrate provides a new technical approach that is creating a class of integrated circuits that will enable more affordable systems for the warfighter,’ said Mark Russell, vice president, of IDS Engineering.
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