High Performance PIN Diode in 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS Process for Broadband Monolithic Control Circuits

This paper presents a novel high isolation and low insertion loss broadband PIN diode implemented in a standard 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS process for upper X-band and lower Ku band LEO satellite phased array communication systems. By optimizing distance between anode and cathode terminals, the PIN diode overcomes the limitation of the common SiGe process which do not have customized etching step to remove the N-epi layer to build a high performance vertical PIN diode. Measurement shows that the PIN diodes achieve less than 1.09 dB insertion loss and isolation between 39dB to 13.67dB over DC to 18 GHz frequency. The PIN diode performance shows great potential for development of high performance MMICs in the standard SiGe processes