The future of bipolar technology for avionics

In the past 25 years, silicon integrated circuit (IC) device technology has been heavily utilized in military and avionics systems due to primary advantages in availability, versatility, environmental ruggedness/reliability, and speed/frequency performance. Silicon n-channel metal oxide semiconductor (NMOS) technology has also rapidly developed and has been dominant for commercial applications due to its previous advantages of cost and density in modest environments, especially for standard memory and microprocessor functions. Complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) LSI/VLSI has more recently rapidly emerged as the dominant MOS device technology of the the future. The long held speed performance advantage of silicon bipolar ICS is also being challenged by the superior switching speed of GaAs field-effect transistor (FET) ICs. The question arises as to the future competitiveness and role of silicon bipolar. The question is further examined in this paper, especially for future avionics systems applications having heavy realtime digital signal processing requirements.