A 250 GHz hetero-integrated VCO with 0.7 mW output power in InP-on-BiCMOS technology

This paper presents a 250 GHz hetero-integrated VCO using InP-on-BiCMOS technology. It consists of a single-ended Colpitts Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) in 0.25 μm SiGe-BiCMOS technology and a common-emitter based frequency tripler in 0.8 μm transferred-substrate (TS) InP-HBT technology, which are combined using a wafer-level BCB bonding process. The VCO operates at 83 GHz and the combined circuit delivers 0.7 mW output power at 250 GHz with 2% tuning range. This result documents recent advances of the hetero integrated process towards THz frequencies.