Speed demon gets hooked on silicon
By Peter Weiss
Industrial scientists have devised a way to coat wafers of silicon, the stuff of the microelectronics revolution, with a high-performance semiconductor whose wider use could be a boon to many areas of electronics. Mating silicon to gallium arsenide, which currently shows up in special applications, has been a technological goal for more than 30 years.
If the fabrication advance announced this month by Motorola in Schaumburg, Ill., works on a commercial scale, fast low-power chips may become less expensive and more common, semiconductor specialists say. The same may prove true of chips hosting solid-state lasers and other optical components.