Abstract
In this paper, we report on the highest speed 240GHz/340GHz FT/FMAX NPN which is now available for product
designs in the SBC18H4 process variant of TowerJazz’s mature 0.18μm SBC18 silicon germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS
technology platform. NFMIN of ~2dB at 50GHz has been obtained with these NPNs. We also describe the integration
of earlier generation NPNs with FT/FMAX of 240GHz/280GHz into SBC13H3, a 0.13μm SiGe BiCMOS technology
platform. Next, we detail the integration of the deep silicon via (DSV), through silicon via (TSV), high-resistivity
substrate, sub-field stitching and hybrid-stitching capability into the 0.18μm SBC18 technology platform to enable
higher performance and highly integrated product designs. The integration of SBC18H3 into a thick-film SOI
substrate, with essentially unchanged FT and FMAX, is also described. We also report on recent circuit demonstrations
using the SBC18H3 platform: (1) a 4-element phased-array 70-100GHz broadband transmit and receive chip with flat
saturated power greater than 5dBm and conversion gain of 33dB; (2) a fully integrated W-band 9-element phase-controllable
array with responsivity of 800MV/W and receiver NETD is 0.45K with 20ms integration time; (3) a 16-element 4x4 phased-array transmitter with scanning in both the E- and H-planes with maximum EIRP of 23-25 dBm at
100-110GHz; (4) a power efficient 200GHz VCO with -7.25dBm output power and tuning range of 3.5%; and (5) a
320GHz 16-element imaging receiver array with responsivity of 18KV/W at 315GHz, a 3dB bandwidth of 25GHz and
a low NEP of 34pW/Hz1/2. Wafer-scale large-die implementation of the phased-arrays and mmWave imagers using
stitching in TowerJazz SBC18 process are also discussed.
