Introduction to the 2006 Bipolar/BiCMOS Circuits and Technology Meeting

Abstract

HIS section of the Special Issue of the IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS contains extended versions of papers solicited from presentations at the 2006 Bipolar/BiCMOS Circuits and Technology Meeting (BCTM), held in Maastricht, The Netherlands. At the annually held BCTM, process engineers, circuit designers and CAD/modelling engineers present their latest results in a highly interactive manner. A one-day short course precedes the conference, and a workshop on Compact Modeling is held after the BCTM. The four papers presented here were recommended for publication by the session (Co-)Chairs of the conference. All papers went through the regular review process of the JOURNAL. The number of papers submitted has stabilized at around 100 over the recent years, with 106 papers submitted in 2006, of which 67 were presented in 15 technical sessions. In 2007, the conference will be held in Boston, MA. In 2008, the conference will most probably be co-located with the Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium (CSICS) in Monterey, CA. The first paper, by Nicolson et al., describes the design and realization of SiGe BiCMOS voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) with operating frequencies ranging from 77 to 106 GHz. Such oscillators can be used for, for example, 77-GHz automotive radar and 94-GHz imaging applications. The oscillators are based on a Colpitts architecture and are realized in two generations of SiGe technology. The 106-GHz VCO operates from a 2.5-V supply voltage and achieves a phase noise of 101.3 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset from the carrier. The paper also presents a comparison between MOS and HBT varactors. Differentially tuned MOS varactors are shown to provide superior performance over HBT varactors for achieving low phase noise. A further interesting aspect of this paper is that the circuits make extensive use of (square) inductors rather than transmission lines to realize the inductances, despite the low inductance values. In addition to the oscillator circuits, a differential MOS-HBT output buffer is also described that delivers an output power of 10.5 dBm at 87 GHz. Based on the scaling properties of the VCOs across the two generations of the process, the authors conclude that VCOs can be used as IC process monitor circuits. The second paper, by van Bezooijen et al., describes power amplifier protection methods based on adaptive output power control. The intended application is cellular phone power amplifiers, but the protection concept is generic. The proposed circuit and methodology provides protection against over-voltage, over-temperature, and over-current. Protection is achieved by detection of the power amplifier die temperature, collector peak voltage, and collector current, and reducing the output power control voltage if one or more of these variables