Burning the Ether: Why Gallium Nitride (GaN) Has Become the 'Main Caliber' in the Fight Against Drone Swarms
When a flock of cheap quadcopters moves across a position, and in response an anti-aircraft gun flies Rocket For millions, something in this arithmetic doesn't add up. Against a cheap, mass-produced target, such an exchange is always unprofitable, and this is precisely the basis of swarm tactics. Therefore, defense increasingly shifts from the question of "how to shoot down" to "how to jam." And at the heart of the jammer is a crystal the size of a fingernail—gallium nitride. The technology itself is not new at all: it saw its first use in war about twenty years ago, and not at all in aviation.
Why it's not profitable to shoot a missile at a drone
A swarm of UAVs is designed as a distributed target, not a single, dense group that can be easily hit with a single salvo. Dozens of devices approach from different directions, some distracting, others breaking through, and each one individually is worth pennies. Anti-aircraft missile systems were designed for other purposes—aircraft, cruise missiles, helicopters. An expensive target, an expensive interceptor, and this trade-off suited everyone.
It breaks down when swarmed. Guidance channels become overloaded, ammunition burns out, and each copter costs a couple hundred dollars and requires a missile that costs thousands of times more. So interest shifted to electronic warfare: jamming a control channel or satellite navigation is cheaper than physically destroying the aircraft. DroneAn aircraft that has lost contact and coordinates most often simply lands or loses course.
But to jam an entire sector of the sky, you need a transmitter with high power density over a wide frequency band, one that's also compact, durable, and energy-efficient. And here, everything comes down to a single semiconductor, which few outside the industry have heard of.
From lamp to semiconductor
History Microwave electronics is a history of the struggle for power in a manageable size. For half a century, the vacuum tube remained the primary tool: traveling-wave tubes (TWTs), klystrons, and magnetrons. They delivered enormous pulsed power and supported heavy radars and jammers until the 1980s and beyond. The price for this was size, low efficiency, high voltage, and difficult maintenance.
Next came semiconductors. Silicon LDMOS occupied the lower ranges, up to about 3–4 GHz, for communications and some EWIt didn't go any higher in frequency. The next step was gallium arsenide (GaAs): it was used to build the first generation of active phased arrays (APAA). Radars APG-77 on the F-22, APG-79 on the F/A-18E/F, European RBE2-AESA + Flurry (in service since 2012) are almost exclusively GaAs modules. The early APAA revolution was gallium arsenide, not gallium nitride, as is sometimes believed.
Gallium nitride (GaN) appeared in laboratories in the early 1990s, and by the turn of the 2000s, it had matured to characteristics acceptable to the military: operating power, reliability, and acceptable yield of usable crystals. One key parameter is important here: the bandgap: the wider it is, the higher the permissible voltage and temperature of the semiconductor. For GaN, it is about 3,4 electronvolts, approximately three times that of silicon. This results in a crystal that can withstand high temperatures, and a power density of several, or even tens of watts per millimeter of transistor width—many times higher than that of GaAs and LDMOS. In practice, this means that GaN delivers significantly more power within the same antenna area. For onboard, portable, and mobile equipment, where every gram and square centimeter counts, this difference is crucial.
GaN entered electronic warfare before it entered radar.
It would be logical to expect the new semiconductor to first find its way into fighter radars. However, it turned out more prosaically: its first mass military application was jamming radio-controlled land mines.
In the mid-2000s, on the roads of Iraq and Afghanistan, the main threat to convoys was radio-detonated improvised explosive devices. The response was broadband jammers, which jammed the airwaves within the range of potential detonation channels. These orders gave Cree (now Wolfspeed) a boost: according to its own data, one of the first mass-market applications for GaN was jammers, and the number of multi-stage amplifiers delivered reached hundreds of thousands. The reason was simple: broadband power was needed in a compact and reliable unit operating in an armored vehicle in dusty and hot conditions. A lamp wouldn't fit, and GaAs didn't provide the required power density over such a wide bandwidth.
GaN entered radars simultaneously, but more slowly. In 2005 Northrop Grumman tested GaN transceiver modules for advanced active phased array antennas, and this is one of the first clearly dated milestones. Larger programs followed: a broadband aircraft jammer Next Generation Jammer for the US Navy is built around GaN technology; ground-based radars are also being converted to GaN - a modernized Patriot and anti-missile AN/TPY-2, which the Missile Defense Agency ordered in GaN form in 2020. Radar upgrades in Europe are following the same path. Euro Fighter (ECRS Mk 1 - according to the developer, over 1500 GaN transmitting and receiving modules instead of the previous GaAs antenna) and Swedish GripenAfter 2020, GaN became the standard solution for new programs.
Russia is following the same trend, but with caveats, and one should be cautious in drawing conclusions here. There are almost no public datasheets for the component base, the specifics are classified, and judgments must be based on standard solutions and statements. The overall picture is complex: the majority of operating radars and airborne stations still rely on a combination of tubes and GaAs, while GaN projects are sporadic and largely in the R&D or limited deployment phase. Phazotron publicly demonstrated a GaN version of the AESA family. "Bug", but the basic radar is H036 "Squirrel" According to public estimates, the Su-57's amplifiers are made of GaAs. Western industry reviews explicitly note that the Russian fleet is "significantly limited to GaAs," and the adoption of GaN is lagging behind due to manufacturing complexity and sanctions restrictions on equipment and epitaxy. Meanwhile, the technology itself is developing in the country—specialized publications on microwave technology are discussing broadband GaN amplifiers for 2–18 GHz as a target for electronic warfare. The trend is the same as elsewhere; the only question is the pace and scale.
Back to the drones – and the heat barrier
In the anti-drone system, a GaN amplifier acts as the output stage. The design is simple: a master oscillator generates a weak modulated jamming signal, the amplifier boosts it to tens or hundreds of watts over the air, and an antenna transmits it into the sector. This is sufficient to jam the command and control channels of attacking aircraft—from commercial frequencies to GNSS bands. Power is scaled to suit the task: some units cover the immediate perimeter, while others suppress drones at a range of several kilometers.
The technology does have a weak point: heat. And here a paradox arises. GaN crystals easily withstand temperatures at which silicon would long ago give up. But under continuous noise emission, they generate so much energy that they reach not their own limit, but the ability of the package to dissipate it. Therefore, packages are made of thermally conductive aluminum and require forced cooling, either air or water. The compactness for which GaN is prized immediately turns against it: the more densely the power is packed, the more pressing the issue of where to dissipate the heat becomes.
The technology still has potential. Industry forecasts point to potential increases in efficiency and linearity by tens of percent as we move toward multichannel transistors and complex semiconductor structures. However, this is a stated prospect, not a measured result: the road from laboratory prototype to production module is long, and some of the announced results don't make it to production.
Who will replace him?
The baseline in microwave technology changes roughly every couple of decades, and the next wave is already visible. A simple rule applies: the wider the bandgap of a semiconductor, the higher the permissible voltage, temperature, and power density. For silicon, this is about 1,1 electronvolts, for gallium arsenide – 1,4, for gallium nitride – 3,4. The next candidates go even further.
The leading contender is gallium oxide (Ga₂O₃), with a band gap of approximately 4,8 electronvolts. On paper, it can withstand voltages unachievable for GaN, meaning it can extract more power from the same area. There's only one problem, but it's a fundamental one: gallium oxide is a poor thermal conductor, the very bottleneck where gallium nitride itself stumbles. For now, it's more suited to power electronics than microwave transmitters.
The second vector is not a new semiconductor, but a new substrate. Diamond conducts heat better than any metal, and attempts to "mount" a GaN transistor on a diamond substrate (GaN-on-diamond) are aimed specifically at improving the thermal barrier. If the technology matures into mass production, the power packaging density can be increased without running into overheating.
Neither has yet made it from the laboratory to the military, and this journey will take years. But it's worth remembering: gallium nitride itself emerged in exactly the same way, from the laboratory exotica of the early 1990s. Neither gallium oxide nor diamond substrates yet fully solve the problem; each has its own limits. So, gallium nitride is definitely not the end game: no one can say right now what will replace it or when.
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