To put it in as simple terms as you can understand: a GaAs "pathway" is only 3 times as fast as a Si "pathway" of the same size.
The maximum GaAs wafer diameter actually available on the market is 4".
But keep dreaming.
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Somewhere below the speed of light is the intrinsic limit to electrical conductivity (i.e. some atomic level energy transfer function in a physics lecture which I can no longer remember!) Obviously you know something about electrical engineering way beyond my level, but a waveform is a waveform is a waveform!
It has a peak, a crossover point and a trough! The amplitude (Y-axis) and horizontal spacing (X-axis) between those is the definer of a logical ON or OFF. A given clock speed is only an indicator of how many of those peaks and troughs I am counting in a second to form a SERIES of bits which are concatenated to form a user-definable set of bytes and then aggregated into commands and data values. Ergo, the higher the clock rate the more commands/data I can fit (minus ECC/CRC/etc.) in that time period. A Two Terahertz clock speed is NOWHERE NEAR the limit of energy transfer within an electrical conductor which forms the basis of a waveform. The only issue is inherent noise floor which makes it tricky to figure out where "bitwise packets" begin and end, the higher the frequency you go! It's a processing of creating high purity traces that don't block as much energy transfer OR allow a more discernable series of "pulses" to be passed around.
Again, I'm NOT an electrical engineer so I don't know much at the truly low-hardware-level of HOW they do that sort of DSP to be able to discern and cleanup an electrical signal that has 60 Billion and Two Trillion pulses a second! THAT is a level of electrical hardware engineering that is TRULY WORLD CLASS !!!!!!!!!
This company has THEIR OWN wafer making capability in BOTH CMOS and GaAs and GaN. It's 200mm by 200mm chips!
I see them every day! TOO BAD SO SAD !!! They ABSOLUTELY HAVE the Quality Assurance technology to ENSURE line trace integrity and doping quality over that large of a substrate! I should note that to etch a chip that size on an Ion beam/Electron Beam etcher is a SLOOOOOW process which is WHY only 1400 of each type of chip has been made! Think of etching rates that says it takes OVER A MONTH to make each chip! Think of how much it costs to buy enough etchers to take over one year to make a mere 2400 chips. I think they actually BOUGHT the entire company so they could force all etcher production to be sent to the parent company! Hint: It's a lot of money! Think of the automated and customized optical scanning technology they had to buy to do quality assurance on that large of a wafer!
In research labs, I've seen researchers that are doing 600 mm wafers in CMOS now! GaAs and GaN is not that far behind at that 600mm size! You've been living in a cocoon! You probably subscribe to Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF magazines !!! Goto some of the symposiums listed therein! It's here NOW! 80 GHZ and 100 GHz is nothing these days! Two Terahertz is starting to mature out of the labs and 4 THz is coming online soon! Go fully opto-electronic and we are into Petahertz+ ranges! This is NOT NEW NEWS !!! Read up on it!
And I should note the designs are PARALLEL and Synchronized so that numeric, string or pixel data gets processed on a specified time schedule and then the results are pushed out within predictable time period for external workstation-level processing/visualization. We care about GROSS AMOUNTS of data packets being processed in parallel on a specific schedule. We don't actually NEED linearly fast individual bits/bytes processing just massively parallel SYNCHRONIZED processing! Remember! We are outputting image tiles that are 128-bits per pixel (RGBA + metadata channels) at 65,536 by 65,536 pixels in size to be filtered and presented on a 64-bit RGBA colour laser projector that can do up to 10,000 fps to visualize neural tissue interaction in real-time!
WE are the ONLY ONES in the world that can do that sort of processing in real-time! Ergo, the parent company built the world's FASTEST supercomputer and LARGEST 64k by 64k resolution multi-RGB-Laser projection system with completely in-house custom-built GaAs 60 GHz and 2 THz clock speed super-chips!
Not even the NSA/DARPA has THAT sort of compute technology!
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It's here NOW! We have it! Deal with it!
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P.S. Scooby Scooby Canon! Where Are You?
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You weren't waiting for this and aren't a buyer anyway, right? So no point.
