We present the electrical characteristics of the first 90nm SiGe BiCMOS technology developed for production in IBM's large volume 200mm fabrication line. The technology features 300 GHz f T and 360 GHz f MAX high performance SiGe HBTs, 135 GHz f T and 2.5V BV CEO medium breakdown SiGe HBTs, 90nm Low Power RF CMOS, and a full suite of passive devices. A design kit supports custom and analog designs and a library of digital functions aids logic and memory design. The technology supports mm-wave and high-performance RF/Analog applications.
The rapidly expanding telecommunications market has led to a need for advanced rf integrated circuits. Complex rf-and mixed-signal system-on-chip designs require accurate prediction early in the design schedule, and time-to-market pressures dictate that design iterations be kept to a minimum. Signal integrity is seen as a key issue in typical applications, requiring very accurate interconnect transmission-line modeling and RLC extraction of parasitic effects. To enable this, IBM has in place a mature project infrastructure consisting of predictive device models, complete rf characterization, statistical and scalable compact models that are hardware-verified, and a robust design automation environment. Finally, the unit and integration testing of all of these components is performed thoroughly. This paper describes each of these aspects and provides an overview of associated development work.
A new four-port scattering parameter (-parameter) and broad-band noise deembedding methodology is presented. This deembedding technique considers distributed on-wafer parasitics in the millimeter-wave band (30 GHz). The procedure is based on simple analytical calculations and requires no equivalent circuit modeling or electromagnetic simulations. Detailed four-port system analysis and deembedding expressions are derived. Comparisons between this new method and the industry-standard "open-short" method were made using measured and simulated data on state-of-the-art SiGe HBTs with a maximum cutoff frequency of approximately 180 GHz. The comparison demonstrates that better accuracy is achieved using this new four-port method. Based on a combination of measurements and HP-ADS simulations, we also show that this new technique can be used to accurately extract the-parameters and broad-band noise characteristics to frequencies above 100 GHz.
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