Selective-epitaxial base technology with 14 ps ECL-gate delay, for low power wide-band communication systems

A silicon bipolar technology is presented that incorporates a selectively epitaxially grown base in a double-polysilicon transistor. Si-bases as well as Si-SiGe-multilayer bases are applied. Both result in excellent device performance, with cut-off and maximum oscillation frequencies up to 45 GHz, and ECL-gate delays down to 13.7 ps. DC-coupled broad-band amplifiers for 15 Gbit/s optical data links have been fabricated, providing record bandwidths of 13.2 GHz. As selective epitaxial growth is performed at 700/spl deg/C in a production epitaxial reactor, this technology can easily be combined with current semiconductor manufacturing technology.