Miracle Material Gets New Life

This is one of a series of reports on basic research discoveries at Harvard that have led to unique products and processes. Since 1980 more than 20 new companies have been started based upon technology developed at the University. This is the story of one of them.

By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

It was touted as the miracle material of the 1980s. A compound of arsenic and a blue-white metal called gallium, which conducts electricity seven times faster than the silicon chips used in all of the world's computers.

What's more, gallium arsenide promised switches that turn on and off in trillionths of a second, a dream come true for makers and users of cellular phones.

Not only that, this material could boost the efficiency of lasers that read compacts discs, allowing more data, music, or graphics to be squeezed onto CDs. Visionaries insisted that it also would be possible to make gallium arsenide solar cells that generate nonpolluting heat and electricity.

Then reality struck. Not only was gallium arsenide difficult to fashion into computer chips and other devices, it degraded when exposed to air. In a matter of weeks, even days, oxygen seriously decays its performance.

At the time, Andrew Barron, associate professor of chemistry, was designing unique materials not found in nature. He came up with a sulfide coating which not only protected gallium arsenide from oxygen, but improved its electronic and optical qualities. In other words, with this covering, gallium arsenide transmits electricity and light better than without it.

Materials for the coating are easy to obtain, and they can be applied as a thin film by a familiar technique known as chemical vapor deposition.

Barron has since moved on to Rice University in Texas. Harvard filed the first of several patent applications on the tailored gallium arsenide in 1992. The University licensed the technology to a startup company called Gallia, located in Cambridge.

"It was an ideal process to build a new company around," notes Kevin Heyeck of Harvard's Office for Technology and Trademark Licensing. "It solved a critical problem, had many applications, and we had good patent protection." The University held a part-ownership of the company.

Startup Buyout

Donald Ciappenelli, former director of Harvard's chemistry laboratories, became the first president of Gallia. "My job was to get this exciting, powerful technology from laboratory experiments to the stage where it could be produced commercially," he recalls.

At first, Gallia found it difficult to raise venture capital because the suppliers of such funds had been burned by premature claims for gallium arsenide in the 1980s. Ciappenelli solved the problem with grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. Such funds are targeted to help small businesses develop novel technology.

With this support, Gallia proved that gallium arsenide devices, protected and improved with a stable coating, can be made in a factory. By working through a startup, Harvard also avoided the prejudice of established corporations, such as Intel and Motorola, against academic research.

"This is because the semiconductor industry, as such chipmakers are known, does not invest large sums of money in developing major new technologies with long lead times," Heyeck explains. "They prefer making incremental, low-risk improvements to their product lines."

Once Gallia lifted gallium arsenide out of high-risk limbo, commercial interest picked up. Last month, Gallia was bought by TriQuint Semiconductor, a maker of chips for cellular telephones. Located in Beaverton, Ore., TriQuint plans to install the coating process at the end of a fabrication line that makes gallium arsenide chips for the phones.

Harvard is encouraging TriQuint to sublicense the technology for other purposes, such as faster CD lasers and new types of chip circuits that operate everything from supercomputers to digital watches.

The exotic compound could become a prime ingredient in high-frequency lasers, fiber optics, and other communications devices. It also can be used in an uncoated form in the winglike panels of cells that convert solar energy into electricity aboard space shuttles and space stations. In the rarefied air, 100 miles or more above Earth, oxygen degradation ceases to be a problem.

"As things now stand," Heyeck says, "I think gallium arsenide is on the threshold of fulfilling much of its promise as a miracle material."

Ciappenelli considers the Gallia story "an excellent model of how so-called ivory-tower research at a university can result in a technology with the potential of a positive effect on the national economy."

And, he adds, "I'll bet there are many other ideas with this kind of potential buried in Harvard laboratories."