NEW SUBMICRON HBT IC TECHNOLOGY DEMONSTRATES ULTRA-FAST, LOW-POWER INTEGRATED-CIRCUITS

A new submicron HBT-based integrated circuit technology has been devel oped to fabricate transistors as small as 0.2 mu m(2) emitter geometry . Using this novel process approach we have been able to reduce our mi nimum device geometry by a factor of more than ten, and reduce the met allization pitch by a factor of two compared to our baseline process. At the same time, the device RF performance improved by a factor of tw o. Submicron heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT's) fabricated wit h this process exhibited f(T) and f(max), values greater than 165 and 140 GHz, respectively, and de current gain of over 50, We hare also de monstrated several circuits using submicron HBT's in this new IC techn ology. In particular, a latching comparator circuit which is a key bui lding block of analog-to-digital converters, performed at 40 GHz, It e xhibited three times the speed, one-third the de power, and one-third the chip size of a similar circuit in our baseline process. A single-c hip, PLL-based clock and data recovery circuit was fully functional at 4 GHz with a power supply voltage of 2.5 V, It consumed a total de po wer of 50 mW, including input and output buffers.