We’re celebrating getting to the “fringe” of the weekend with a Heat Treat Fringe Friday covering news about the promise gallium nitride (GaN) for the future of missions to Venus. Specifically, how this high-temperature-defying material may be used to form semiconductors that won’t melt on the near 900°F surface of Venus.
While not exactly heat treat, “Fringe Friday” deals with interesting developments in one of our key markets: aerospace, automotive, medical, energy, or general manufacturing.
Gallium nitride is a material that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been studying how it performs when exposed to high temperatures. They have recently announced that their research has shown successful performance results at 500°C for 48 hours.
The surface of Venus can reach temperatures of up to 480°C. With silicon-based electronics incapable of operating at these high temperatures or a long duration of time, finding a material that can take the heat becomes critical to prospect of sending a rover to the planet’s surface.
John Niroula, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the paper, commented, “Transistors are the heart of most modern electronics, but we didn’t want to jump straight to making a gallium nitride transistor because so much could go wrong. We first wanted to make sure the material and contacts could survive, and figure out how much they change as you increase the temperature. We’ll design our transistor from these basic material building blocks.”
Funding of this research has come from numerous interested parties, including the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Intel Corporation, and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
Read more about this news here.
