Hot-carrier induced degradations on RF power characteristics of SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors

Hot-carrier (HC) effects on high-frequency and RF power characteristics of Si/SiGe HBTs were investigated in this paper. We found that the small-signal current gain, output power, and power gain of Si/SiGe HBTs suffer due to the HC stress. With different bias conditions, the degradations of cutoff frequency and output power were found to be worse under constant base-current measurement than that under constant collector-current measurement. These phenomena have been explained by the change of the current gain, transconductance, and base-emitter resistance under stress.