Outlook

Abstract

After about 16 years of outstanding progress in research and development, the challenging III-N material system is about to emerge into the open waters of system introduction. Some great achievements have been made, and others are yet to come: we will see higher operation frequencies, greater wafer formats, still higher output powers, and great results in linearity, efficiency, and bandwidth. However, as the experience of the GaAs devices has proven, a long way is still ahead until full use of material capabilities in subsystems and systems is achieved. Disappointments occur and will continue to arise due to reliability problems on the system level, especially since the proposed high-voltage operation has not been tested on the system-level so far. Further, new mechanisms of degradation at the proposed output power levels will be important, and extremely careful optimization will be necessary to sort out the details. Disappointments will also occur for industrialization, as the emerging markets will not be able to support all business plans. Schumpeter’s law of the rise and fall of innovators and competitors will play a dominant role.