Integration and design issues in combining very-high-speed silicon-germanium bipolar transistors and ULSI CMOS for system-on-a-chip applications

In the last decade, silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) BICMOS technology has developed from being a lab curiosity to becoming a production manufacturing technology that replaces and extends the performance of silicon-based BICMOS technology. The impetus for this development has been the insatiable requirement for bandwidth in network communication at speeds up to 40 Gbit/s and the rapid growth of the global cellular and wireless LAN markets. To meet the stringent criteria of many of these communications protocols, SiGe technology offers a cost-effective system-level solution compared to gallium-arsenide and other approaches. This paper will focus on integration, manufacturing and design issues in SiGe BICMOS circuits and systems, based on 15 years of work in our labs and fabs, and 4 generations of scaling CMOS-compatible SiGe, with concrete examples.