Impact of Power Cell Design on RF Performance of CE and CB SiGe Power HBTs

Author

Qin, Guoxuan ; Ma, Zhenqiang ; Lopez, Jerry ; Lie, Donald Y C

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI

fYear

2008

fDate

23-25 Jan. 2008

Firstpage

66

Lastpage

69

Abstract

Large-signal power performance of SiGe power HBTs are compared between common-emitter (CE) and common-base (CB) configurations with different layout structures and different unit subcells. Experiment results show that at high frequency (6 GHz), CB SiGe power HBTs have both higher small-signal and large-signal power gain values than the CE configuration. With optimization of layout and unit subcells, the power performance of both CE and CB SiGe power HBTs is significantly improved. The CB SiGe HBTs maintain the superior power gain characteristics over the CE SiGe HBTs in high frequency range, while CE SiGe HBTs become superior to CB SiGe HBTs in the low frequency range. The reasons for the device performance improvement and rules of optimizing power cell layout are discussed.

Keywords

Ge-Si alloys; heterojunction bipolar transistors; microwave bipolar transistors; power bipolar transistors; RF performance; SiGe; common-base configurations; common-emitter configuration; large-signal power performance; performance improvement; power HBT; power cell design; superior power gain characteristics; BiCMOS integrated circuits; Design engineering; Drives; Germanium silicon alloys; Heterojunction bipolar transistors; Power engineering and energy; Power measurement; Radio frequency; Scattering parameters; Silicon germanium;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems, 2008. SiRF 2008. IEEE Topical Meeting on

Conference_Location

Orlando, FL

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1855-8

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-1856-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SMIC.2008.23

Filename

4446257