Laser-induced single event effect on SiGe BiCMOS low noise amplifier

Abstract

With the further development of the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and the silicon-germanium (SiGe) epitaxy technology, SiGe bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) low noise amplifiers (LNAs) are widely used in the first level of radio frequency (RF) transceiver system in space. The core part of SiGe BiCMOS LNA is SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor (SiGe HBT) which naturally possesses excellent temperature characteristic and favorable build-in total ionizing dose and displacement damage resistance without any radiation damage. However, the single event effect caused by the transient charge collection is the bottleneck problem, restricting its application in space. In this work, laser microbeam experiments are carried out on a SiGe BiCMOS LNA in which the sensitive region of single event effect is located. The experimental results indicate that the transient charge collection of SiGe HBT is the main reason for the single event effect of SiGe BiCMOS LNA. TCAD simulations show that the ionization track caused by ions incident in CMOS region will cross the deep trench isolation (DTI) structure, generating electron-hole pairs in SiGe HBT region and causing transient charge collection. The circuit simulations by ADS show that the peak value of the transient voltage will drop sharply when the SEE pulse transient voltage crosses the capacitor between the first stage and the second stage, which indicates that the capacitor plays an important role in transmitting the transient pulses caused by single event effect. The experimental and simulation results in this work provide technical support for realizing anti-radiation by designing the single event effect of SiGe BiCMOS LNA.