A low-cost 180 nm BiCMOS technology with Horizontal Current Bipolar Transistor (HCBT) for wireless communication ICs

A performance of very low-cost 180 nm BiCMOS Horizontal Current Bipolar Transistor (HCBT) technology in wireless communication frequency band is analyzed. A down-converting mixer and divide-by-2 static frequency divider, fabricated using two different HCBT transistors are presented. The higher breakdown-voltage HCBT (3 additional lithography masks) has fT=32.3 GHz, BVceo=3.5 V and a lower Ic at peak fr, while the simplest HCBT (only 2 additional lithography masks) has fr=44.6 GHz and BVceo=2.7 V. The high-linearity mixer performance (with IIP3 up to 25 dBm and CG above 0 dB) is achieved with two HCBTs. Both frequency dividers have maximum operation frequency higher than 11 GHz with only 39 mW of power consumption.