Interest of Niobium project

The growing demand for connectivity lead to increase the operating frequencies of the components, and more particularly of the transistors. The main interest of the project is to develop a new generation of vertical high-frequency components fabricated on silicon substrates (advantageous from the industrial perspective).

Although Gallium Nitride High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) have been investigated over the last 20 years, their lateral geometry turns out to be a disadvantage for increasing the operating frequencies.
Vertical geometry transistors may overcome several limits of the High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMT) for two mains reasons:

• the need for device lateral shrinkage is relaxed in comparison to the HEMT,
• the device is much less sensitive to surface effects, as the current is located in the volume of the conducting layers.

Moreover there are many other areas of physics that will benefit from the results of the Niobium project, such as:

• very high frequency acoustic resonators,
• the study of disorder on superconducting properties,
• and the development of high performance single photon detectors.