Impact of profile design and scaling on large signal performance of SiGe HBTs

This paper experimentally investigates the large signal performance of SiGe HBTs, including the impact of SiGe profile, breakdown voltage-speed tradeoff, and technology scaling. An inevitable tradeoff between optimum small signal gain/noise performance and large signal linearity is identified, and implications for profile optimization are established. Besides the expected small signal performance improvement, the 200 GHz SiGe technology shows an impressive large signal performance with a 36% power added efficiency at 20 GHz without any matching network for a supply voltage of only 1.1 V.