Applications focused trends in sige bicmos technologies

Silicon Germanium (SiGe) Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) BiCMOS technology has become a major player in the fast growing communication sector of the semiconductor market. The technology's combination of compound semiconductor like performance integrated with industry standard CMOS logic and high performance passives make it the technology of choice for a broad range of applications ranging from 0.9 to 77 GHz. The expansion of this application range has been due in part to the well documented and impressive increases in SiGe HBT performance. There have also been less publicized advances in SiGe BiCMOS technologies with a focus on optimization and cost reduction for a specific subset of applications. Here we present and compare those two trends in SiGe BiCMOS technologies.