Si/SiGe HBT technology for low-cost monolithic microwave integrated circuits

A VCO with on chip tank for IEEE 802.11a

“…A number of published works report research activities dealing with this problem, but most of them introduce changes in the process technology or suggest postprocessing techniques to increase the inductors quality factor [8,9]. It has been used Momentum©, from Agilent Technologies, a fast 2.5-dimensional design tool, and accepting complex coil geometries.…”

The Impact of Silicon Technology on Future Microwave Systems

“…These efforts include the use of thick gold metallization [27]. multiple metal layers in parallel [28], bulk micromachining techniques for the removal of resistive material underneath the inductor [29], and spun-on thick dielectrics [30] to physically separate the inductor from the lossy silicon substrate. A further improvement in the Q of monolithic inductors was recently demonstrated by resechers, who employed "porous silicon" processing techniques to increase the resistivity of the bulk substrate underneath a spiral inductor [31].…”

Wide range fully integrated VCO with new cells-based varactor

“…These circuits are particularly important in phase locked loops, used for clock generation and synchronisation (Craninckx and Steayert 1995). For the implementation of these circuits silicon-based technologies are used, like SiGe or BiCMOS (Larson, Case, Rosenbaum, and Rensh 1996).…”