AGANTI: Generation of capabilities in Gallium Nitride (GaN) manufacturing and advanced packaging technology

Description of the project

The main objective of the project is to enable the generation of national manufacturing capacity for GaN devices, for which the creation of a national GaN manufacturing plant is proposed. This will allow the manufacturing of critical high-power and wide-bandwidth GaN RF devices in the supply chain for defense and communications. Additionally, advanced packaging capability generation will be addressed, where the study of various novel mounting/soldering mechanisms for MMIC devices and complementary circuits necessary for the realization of compact TRM modules through the use of mixed technology SiP (System in Package) (RF/digital) will be proposed.

Industrial partners

Indra's rol

Indra is the leading company in this consortium and will oversee its coordination. It is also responsible for several work packages and participates as a collaborator in the remaining packages. Indra leads the tasks related to the design and development of the demonstrator based on advanced "straight assembly" techniques, as well as collaborating on the design and development tasks of the digital SiP.

Universities and technology centers subcontracted

Technologies employed

Semiconductor industry is essential and strategic in the defense and security sector. GaN technology offers great potential for low RF/millimeter wave communication due to its excellent physical properties. The technology can handle higher switching frequencies than current Si-based technology due to its high mobility. Beyond speed, GaN-based technology is capable of delivering high output power with good energy efficiency. These characteristics can make GaN an attractive technology for use in power amplifiers (PA) residing in the front-end modules of next-generation mobile phones and small cells, as well as in defense system-oriented communication applications.
Furthermore, advanced device packaging techniques enable heterogeneous integration, whose challenge is to unify different domains (radiofrequency, analog, digital, with the possibility of also using photonic/optical devices) under the same device with high performance, low size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP-C).

More information

This Project, with file number EXP 00162501 / MIG-20231012, has been financed from the "Next Generation EU" funds of the European Union's Recovery and Resilience Facility.