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.
In this paper we introduce, a state-of-the-art SiGe BiCMOS power amplifier technology that features two NPNs with 40 GHz / 6.0 V & 27 GHz / 8.5 V (fT -BVceo) respectively, a novel low inductance metal ground through-silicon-via (TSV), integrated on a low-cost 0.35 ,um lithography node with 3.3 V / 5.0 V dualgate CMOS technology and high-quality passives on a 50 Q.cm substrate.
INTRODUCTIONToday for RF radio applications, the system is partitioned to minimize the overall cost, size, and power. Competing approaches with system-on-a-chip and system-in-a-package effectively address this system partitioning. Based on these approaches, the RF transceiver and front-end-modules (FEM) integration is still a battleground for multiple technologies. Of particular interest is the power amplifier (PA) integration trend. Compared to the transceiver, the FEM elements, such as, PA and switch need to support very harsh environment for power and linearity. Stringent system specifications requirements related to output power, linearity, efficiency etc. force system designers to partition the FEM as a separate packaged module. In effect, this allows the use of best possible technology for the lowest cost module [1]. This situation is expected to get worse in future wireless communication systems where the FEMs need to integrate multi-mode and multi-band PAs with better form-factor and cost. Silicon technology remains as an excellent candidate for providing such an integration path. SiGe BiCMOS has made substantial in-road into PA market segment with the explosion of WLAN applications at 2.4 GHz. A 0.5um SiGe BiCMOS technology [2] optimized for power amplifier design has provided a stepping stone for this application. SiGe BiCMOS integration allows several benefits compared to GaAs HBTs, such as, integrated biasing and regulator to manage battery voltage, temperature compensated
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