Abstract

The InGaP emitter HBT technology is rapidly emerging as the dominant HBT technology because of its recognized better manufacturability, transistor reliability, and current gain stability over current and temperature than its AlGaAs emitter counterpart. Although the majority of commercial HBT products are still based on the AlGaAs emitter HBT process, we demonstrated that a direct drop-in replacement of the AlGaAs HBT process with an InGaP HBT technology was possible without affecting much the circuit performance simply by changing a few steps in transistor processing. In addition, we showed that our InGaP emitter HBT process was indeed a more manufacturable process as evidenced from the improved uniformity across a four-inch wafer, high yields and tight distributions of electrical characteristics of our HBT devices and circuits.