Study of Low-Temperature Effects in Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor Technology

Abstract

This thesis investigates the effects of low temperatures on Silicon Germanium (SiGe) Hterojunction Bipolar Transistors (HBT) BiCMOS technology. A comprehensive set of dc measurements were taken on first, second, third and fourth generation IBM SiGe technology over a range of temperatures (room temperature to 43K for first generation, and room temperature to 15K for the rest). This work is unique in the sense that this sort of comprehensive study of dc characteristics on four SiGe HBT technology generations over a wide range of temperatures has never been done before to the best of the authors knowledge.