Effect of composite collector design on the breakdown behavior of InGaP/GaAs double heterojunction bipolar transistor

Abstract

A series of experiments and calculations has been carried out to study the effect of different composite collector designs on InGaP/GaAs/InGaP double heterojunction bipolar transistor breakdown characteristics. A comparison between uncorrected and dead-space corrected models was carried out, and it was found that the dead-space effect is dominant for collector thickness below 300 nm. However, this effect can be neglected for collector thickness larger than 500 nm. The role of lightly doped GaAs (n−-GaAs) and heavily doped InGaP (N+-InGaP) spacer layers is discussed systematically to establish a criterion for designing the composite collector structure. The experimental and theoretical results show that it is necessary to keep the sum of n−-GaAs and N+-InGaP spacer layer thickness below 50 nm to avoid significant degradation of the device breakdown characteristics.