Offset voltage of Schottky-collector silicon-on-glass vertical PNP’s
G. Lorito, L. K. Nanver and N. Nenadović
Laboratory of ECTM, DIMES, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5053, 2600 GB Delft,
The Netherlands, Email: nanver@dimes.tudelft.nl
Abstract — Silicon-on-glass vertical PNP’s are fabricated
and investigated with respect to the influence of the collector
design on the offset voltage. With Schottky collector contacts
the offset voltage can be made both very low (< 0.1 V) or
very high (~ 0.3 V).
Index Terms — Offset voltage, ohmic collector contact,
Schottky collector contacts, silicon-on-glass, vertical PNP’s.
I. INTRODUCTION
Substrate transfer processes are attracting attention as
possible low-cost technologies enabling high-performance
low-power RF integrated circuits with on-chip RF
integration of active devices and high-quality passive
components [1, 2]. From a device design point of view
they are very attractive if, like the silicon-on-glass process
used in this work [3], they give direct access to both sides
of the device. Particularly for bipolar transistors, where
the active current path is vertical to the surface from the
emitter to the collector, the availability of the collector
contact directly under the emitter can eliminate the need
for buried layers, the device size can be considerably
reduced and the speed performance increased by the
reduction of parasitic series resistance and capacitance.
In this work fully-implanted vertical PNP’s (VPNP’s)
have been added to a 25 GHz silicon-on-glass NPN
process [3]. Several types of collector contact designs,
including ohmic p
+
-regions and p- or n-type Al/Si
Schottky junctions, were fabricated on the backside of the
wafer to create different p-type BJT’s. Designs similar to
the n-Schottky collector device have in the past been
proposed and predicted to give potentially better BJT
speed performance due to the low collector resistance,
transit time and storage time [4]. The possible speed
advantage cannot be verified with the present devices
because the relaxed device dimensions result in a large
base transit time that dominates the device speed. An
advantage of the dimensions, however, is that the low
current I-V characteristics are near ideal and the influence
of the collector design on the offset voltage can be
accurately investigated. For high-frequency applications
the offset voltage is normally not an issue but in
analog/power applications it can lead to undesirable extra
power consumption and must be taken into consideration.
Fig. 1. SIMS profile of the intrinsic VPNP implantations after
the 950°C thermal anneal. The distance to the collector contact is
indicated for the three fabricated values of the silicon top-layer
thickness: 640, 740 and 940 nm.
Fig. 2. Schematic cross section of the silicon-on-glass p-type
BJT with (a) implanted and laser-annealed ohmic collector
contact, (b) p-Schottky collector contact and (c) n-Schottky
collector contact. Depletion regions are indicated by white
regions in (a)-(c).
II. EXPERIMENTAL MATERIAL
The doping profile of the intrinsic VPNP is shown in
Fig. 1. A number of collector designs were realized by
varying both the thickness, t
Si
, and doping of the SOI
silicon top-layer as well as the collector contacting
method. Schematic cross sections of the fabricated devices
are given in Fig. 2. Ohmic contacts (Fig. 2a) were made
by a 5 × 10
15
cm
-2
5 keV BF
2
+
implantation and dopant
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IEEE BCTM 2.2