SiGe BiCMOS Terabit Platform

High performance SiGe BiCMOS technologies with ultra-high Ft/Fmax

High performance SiGe BiCMOS technologies with Ft/Fmax of 300GHz and beyond

Tower Semiconductor offers high performance SiGe BiCMOS technologies optimized for tomorrow’s high-frequency wireless communications and high-speed networking applications. This industry-leading manufacturing platform includes transistors with speeds exceeding Ft/Fmax of 325/450GHz for use in 10, 100 and 400GbE data communications or high-frequency wireless applications such as 24GHz and 77GHz automotive radar and 5G mm-wave. The platform offers low-noise transistors for use in smartphone and GPS wireless receivers and high-power transistors for use in mobile and IoT wireless transmitters.

Tower Semiconductor’s most popular SiGe BiCMOS volume production process today is SBC18H5 which is ideal for optical fiber transceiver components such as Trans-impedance amplifiers (TIAs), laser drivers (LDs), limiting amplifiers (LAs) and clock data recovery (CDRs) with data rates up to 400Gb/s and beyond.

This platform is also perfectly suited for mm-wave phased array applications due to its low noise performance for receivers (< 1.3dB at 40GHz), high dynamic range for transmitters, and low-cost relative to comparably performing CMOS nodes. As an example, the world’s largest single-chip phased array featuring 256 transmitter elements outputting 43 dBm (EIRP) at 60GHz was built in the SBC18H3 process (Zihir et al. RFIC 2015). Company’s SBC18H5 technology is now being adopted for next generation 800 Gb/s data networks.

PLATFORM FEATURES: 

  • Ultra low noise and high linearity transistors
  • 0.35µm, 0.18µm, 0.13µm, and 65nm CMOS nodes
  • Single and dual gate CMOS to provide high levels of mixed signal and logic integration
  • SiGe HBT transistors with Ft / Fmax of 325/450 GHz and beyond
  • Complementary BiCMOS with high-speed vertical PNP transistors (Ft up to 23GHz available) and BVceo up to 16V
  • High-density MIM Caps (up to 5.6fF/µm2)
  • Varactors, poly and metal resistors, High-Q inductors, deep trench and triple-well isolation
  • Up to 7 levels of metal with Al and Cu metallization
  • Comprehensive standard cell libraries
  • I/O libraries
  • Memory generators
  • Synopsys and Cadence ASIC flows
  • Stand-alone Cadence, Synopsys PDKs with support for ADS interoperability
  • Inductor and transmission line toolboxes enabling rapid synthesis
  • Foundry certified EM stack-ups for EMX and ADS Momentum Silicon verified reference flows for sub-6 GHz wireless and 28 GHz mmWave
  • Enabling wireless front-end-module on a chip

SiGe BiCMOS Markets Served

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