RD-11.15-16.2022-Finwave-Semiconductor

MARK DIPSEY: Hi. Thank you, I'm Mark Dipsey, a senior engineer and project manager with Finwave Semiconductor. Unfortunately our CEO, Bin Lu, wasn't able to make it, an MIT Alumni. But our technology was invented at MIT by himself as well as Professor Tomas Palacios. And it is unlocking the true power of 5G.

So we all know that 5G is the future of wireless technology. It's able to transmit data to your phones at much higher speeds. And it does that by operating at much higher frequencies in the millimeter wave regime. Unfortunately, the incumbent technology right now is holding back the potential for this technology. It has very weak uplink, only about 10% of what manufacturers would desire.

And the power amplifiers are operating at less than 10% power efficiency. What this means is that manufacturers are having to roll out more base stations and handsets are experiencing poor battery efficiency, resulting in high costs for manufacturers. And why is this? The answer in short is silicon.

Silicon has been the leading material across the semiconductor world for decades now, with a ton of research having gone into it. But we're reaching the limits of what we can do with silicon. As a result, there's been a lot of research in recent years going into different materials, such as gallium nitride.

If this is your first time hearing of gallium nitride, I can promise it won't be the last, because this material is set to revolutionize the semiconductor industry. At these higher frequencies needed for 5G standards, gallium nitride is able to offer much higher power efficiency and power output than silicon. On top of that, Finwave's technology is a 3D GaN FinFET technology which utilizes a third dimension of design freedom to achieve even higher efficiency.

Utilizing this three dimensional gate allows us to have better control over the electric fields, the threshold voltage of our transistors, and overall achieve an unprecedented level of linearity compared to other incumbent technologies. To put some numbers on that, we've shown that our devices are able to achieve 10 times higher power than RF silicon-on-insulator, and 10 times higher linearity than current state of the art GaN transistors. We're also producing our devices on 8 inch GaN on silicon wafers at existing CMOS foundries, allowing us to produce them at a significantly lower cost than other advanced technologies, at a price point very comparable to current silicon technology.

We've presented a lot of this information to customers and they are extremely excited about the potential. They're very anxious to get our technology in their base stations and their handsets. Unfortunately, I'm not able to disclose any more specifics than that right now. But one thing I am able to talk about is our ARPA-E project. Through the Department of Energy grant and their ARPA-E scale-up program, we're working to bring our technology to full scale production at a US-based CMOS compatible fab, to shore up GaN production supply chains for years to come.

So with that, we're seeking any collaborators within the 5G supply chain, including high volume foundry partners, RF front-end manufacturers, and 5G infrastructure OEMs. You can see some contact information for some of the people in our company there. And we'd love to talk with you if you come stop by our booth. Thank you.