Hot-carrier induced degradations on RF power characteristics of SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors

Author

Huang, Sheng-Yi ; Chen, Kun-Ming ; Huang, Guo-Wei ; Hsu, Tsun-Lai ; Tseng, Hua-Chou ; Chang, Chun-Yen

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. Eng., Nat. Chiao Tung Univ., Hsinchu, Taiwan

fYear

2004

Firstpage

193

Lastpage

196

Abstract

Hot-carrier (HC) effects on high-frequency and RF power characteristics of Si/SiGe HBTs were investigated in this paper. We found that the small-signal current gain, output power, and power gain of Si/SiGe HBTs suffer due to the HC stress. With different bias conditions, the degradations of cutoff frequency and output power were found to be worse under constant base-current measurement than that under constant collector-current measurement. These phenomena have been explained by the change of the current gain, transconductance, and base-emitter resistance under stress.

Keywords

Ge-Si alloys; electric current; electric resistance; elemental semiconductors; heterojunction bipolar transistors; hot carriers; microwave bipolar transistors; semiconductor device measurement; semiconductor device reliability; semiconductor materials; silicon; HC stress; RF power characteristics; Si-SiGe; Si/SiGe HBT; SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors; base-emitter resistance; bias conditions; constant base-current measurement; constant collector-current measurement; cutoff frequency degradation; high-frequency power characteristics; hot-carrier effects; hot-carrier induced degradation; output power; power gain; small-signal current gain; transconductance; Degradation; Electrical resistance measurement; Germanium silicon alloys; Heterojunction bipolar transistors; Hot carriers; Power generation; Power measurement; Radio frequency; Silicon germanium; Stress;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Physical and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits, 2004. IPFA 2004. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on the

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8454-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IPFA.2004.1345589

Filename

1345589