Ultimate Speed of Bipolar Devices: Will the Gap Between CMOS and Bipolar be Maintained?

The history of integrated circuits started with bipolar technology. During the 70´s the complementary MOS technology (CMOS) arose. This silicon technology was restricted first to slow but very low power watch circuits. Since this time the market share of CMOS products increased a lot. Today this technology can be regarded as the mainstream technology worldwide for digital integrated circuits. For quite a long time it was thought that bipolar even would be pushed out of its designated market segments namely high speed IC products. In recent years, however, a renaissance of bipolar technology occured due to a lot of technology innovations just to name the polysilicon emitter and novel self-alignment schemes. Thus today the question is again open for discussion where the borderline of application areas has to be drawn for bipolar and CMOS. The presentation gives a state of the art review of bipolar technology and proves its unique speed advantage by demonstrator circuits and products. It is shown that already today 10 Gbit/s systems can be done in silicon bipolar. The perspectives of this technology are summarized next. Bipolar and CMOS performances are compared then with respect to speed and power dissipation in a general way. Finally the application areas for CMOS and bipolar are split up based on this reasoning.