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Smart structures and materials
Published in Jun Ohta, Smart CMOS Image Sensors and Applications, 2020
Before describing the sensors, we briefly overview the materials SiGe and germanium. SixGe1−x is a mixed crystal of Si and Ge with an arbitrary composition x [260]. The bandgap can be varied from that of Si (x = 1), Eg(Si) = 1.12 eV or λg(Si) = 1.1 μm to that of Ge (x = 0), Eg(Ge) = 0.66 eV or λg(Ge) = 1.88 μm. SiGe on silicon is used for hetero-structure bipolar transistors (HBT) or strained MOS FETs in high-speed circuits. The lattice mismatch between the lattice constants of Si and Ge is so large that it is difficult to grow a thick SiGe epitaxial layers on the Si substrate. Recently, Ge on Si technology has been advanced for high speed receivers in optical fiber communication where light at 1.3–1.5 μm wavelength region is used [261]. The high quality of epitaxial Ge layer on Si has been obtained by various methods to alleviate the large lattice mismatch between Si and Ge [261]. By using these technologies developed for high speed optical communication, image sensors with the Ge detection layers have been developed [262, 263]. The other material in NIR – SWIR is InGaAs.
The Big Picture
Published in John D. Cressler, Circuits and Applications Using Silicon Heterostructure Devices, 2018
SiGe HBT BiCMOS is the obvious ground-breaker of the Si heterostructures application space in terms of moving the ideas of our field into viable products for the marketplace. The field is young, but the signs are very encouraging. As can be seen in Figure 1.2, there are at present count 25 + SiGe HBT industrial fabrication facilities on line in 2005 around the world, and growing steadily. This trend points to an obvious recognition that SiGe technology will play an important role in the emerging electronics infrastructure of the twenty-first century. Indeed, as I often point out, the fact that virtually every major player in the communications electronics field either: (a) has SiGe up and running in-house, or (b) is using someone else’s SiGe fab as foundry for their designers, is a remarkable fact, and very encouraging in the grand scheme of things. As indicated above, projections put SiGe ICs at a US$2.0 billion level by 2006, small by percentage perhaps compared to the near trillion dollar global electronics market, but growing rapidly.
The Big Picture
Published in John D. Cressler, SiGe and Si Strained-Layer Epitaxy for Silicon Heterostructure Devices, 2017
SiGe HBT BiCMOS is the obvious ground-breaker of the Si heterostructures application space in terms of moving the ideas of our field into viable products for the marketplace. The field is young, but the signs are very encouraging. As can be seen in Figure 1.2, there are at present count 25 + SiGe HBT industrial fabrication facilities on line in 2005 around the world, and growing steadily. This trend points to an obvious recognition that SiGe technology will play an important role in the emerging electronics infrastructure of the twenty-first century. Indeed, as I often point out, the fact that virtually every major player in the communications electronics field either: (a) has SiGe up and running in-house, or (b) is using someone else’s SiGe fab as foundry for their designers, is a remarkable fact, and very encouraging in the grand scheme of things. As indicated above, projections put SiGe ICs at a US$2.0 billion level by 2006, small by percentage perhaps compared to the near trillion dollar global electronics market, but growing rapidly.
A 12-bit 1.0/2.0 GS/s Pipeline ADC in 0.18 µm SiGe BiCMOS
Published in International Journal of Electronics, 2018
Parallel multistage structure like pipeline or pipelined SAR is quite popular in analogue–digital converter (ADC) design nowadays due to its balance of speed, resolution and power efficiency. Although pipeline ADC can achieve high speed, its speed is still limited by the some key analogue blocks such as residue amplifiers and reference buffer. To boost the speed of a pipeline ADC furthermore, time-interleaving (TI) is often adopted (Wu & Chou, 2016). Nonetheless, TI structure introduces other challenges such as offset mismatch-induced spur, gain mismatch-induced spur and timing skew error. Timing skew error is relatively more difficult to remedy (Mafi & Yargholi, 2017). In this work, we propose a TI pipeline ADC that consists of two identical channels. Since high-speed SiGe devices provided by the process is power and area efficient due to their special structure, we use them as many as possible in key analogue circuits (Chammas & Li, 2015; Payne & Sestok, 2011).