The ESD Handbook

21ESD in Silicon Germanium Carbon

21.1 Heterojunctions and Silicon Germanium Carbon Technology

In today’s RF technologies, the silicon (Si) homo-junction bipolar transistor has been dominated by new hetero-junction bipolar technologies. The hetero-junction bipolar transistor (HBT) has outperformed the homo-junction bipolar junction transistor (BJT). With the introduction of the silicon germanium HBT, and currently the silicon germanium carbon HBT, these devices became the natural evolutionary step beyond the silicon BJT [1–43].

With the increased volume and growth in the RF applications that use SiGe HBT devices for external circuitry, the quantification of the silicon germanium carbon (SiGeC) HBT devices during electrostatic overstress (EOS) and electrostatic discharge (ESD) sensitivities, as well as construction of ESD networks, has become more important.

21.2 Silicon Germanium Carbon

Silicon germanium alloy films have enabled the reality of integration of advanced silicon technology with the HBT devices. In order to achieve higher speeds, the introduction of new processes have emerged to combat the technology scaling limitations of the silicon germanium HBT devices [1–43]. One of the scaling limitations of the SiGe npn HBT device is the npn transistor base width [18–25]. In order to reduce the transit time, the base width is required to dimensionally scale to a smaller dimension, in order to increase the unity current gain cutoff frequency, f_T. Additionally, the base doping ...