Low-power multi-GHz and multi-Gb/s SiGe BiCMOS circuits

Abstract

Over the. last decade, SiCe HBT BiCMOS technology has matured from a laboratory research effort to become a 50/65-GHz nax silicon-based 0.5-μm BiCMOS production technology. This progress has extended silicon-based production technology into the multigigahertz (multi-GHz) and multigigabits-per-second (multi-Gb/s) range, thus, opening up an array of wireless and wired circuit and network applications and markets. SiGe circuits are now being designed in the same application space as GaAs MESFET and HRTs, and offer the yield, cost, stability and manufacturing advantages associated with conventional silicon fabrication. A wide range of microwave circuits have been built in this technology including 5.8-GHz low-noise amplifiers with I-V supply, up to 17-GHz fully monolithic VCOs with excellent figures of merit, high-efficiency 2.4-GPIz power devices with supply voltage of 1.5 V, and more complicated functions such as 2.5/5.0-GHz frequency synthesizer circuits as well as 10/12.5-Gb/s clock and data recovery PLLs. This paper focuses on several kev circuit applications of SiGe BiCMOS technology and describes the performance improvements that can be obtained by its utilization in mixed-signal microwave circuit design. By way of examples, the article highlights the fact that the combination of high-bandwidth, high-gain and low-noise SiGe HRTs with dense CMOS functionality in a SiGe BiCMOS technology enables implementation of powerful single-chip transceiver architectures for multt-GHz and multi-Gb/s communication applications. © 2000 IEEE.