Spire to pursue Air Force transistor research

Engineers at Spire Corp. in Bedford, Mass., are continuing their research into new high-frequency transistors for military and commercial communications. Spire is moving forward with the work under a $750,000 contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The contract calls for Spire engineers to build on their research into advanced transistor materials and devices for the Air Force and U.S. Navy. Company experts will use their proprietary metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) process to build heterojunction bipolar transistor structures that they hope will be more reliable, use less power, and integrate more easily than those kinds of devices are today. Spire engineers use a gallium arsenide nitride base region doped with carbon, which they grow on gallium arsenide wafers. For more information, contact Spire`s Harvey Serreze by phone at 781-275-6000, by fax at 781-275-7470, by e-mail at hserreze@ spirecorp.com, by post at One Patriots Park, Bedford, Mass. 01730, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.spirecorp.com/. — J.K.