Scaling Mesa InP DHBTs to Record Bandwidths

Scaling Mesa InP DHBTs to Record Bandwidths Evan Lobisser Indium phosphide heterojunction bipolar transistors are able to achieve higher bandwidths at a given feature size than transistors in the Silicon material system for a given feature size. Indium phosphide bipolar transistors demonstrate higher breakdown voltages at a given bandwidth than both Si bipolars and field effect transistors in the InP material system. The high bandwidth of InP HBTs results from both intrinsic material parameters and bandgap engineering through epitaxial growth. The electron mobility in the InGaAs base and saturation velocity in the InP collector are both approximately three times higher than their counterparts in the SiGe material system. Resistance of the base can be made very low due to the large offset in the valence band between the InP emitter and the InGaAs base, which allows the base to be doped on the order of 10 cm−3 with negligible reduction in emitter injection efficiency. This thesis deals with type-I, NPN dual-heterojunction bipolar transistors. The emitters are InP, and the base is InGaAs. There is a thin (∼10 nm) n-type InGaAs “setback” region, followed by a chirped superlattice InGaAs/InAlAs grade to the InP collector. The setback, grade, and collector are all lightly doped n-type. The emitter and collector are contacted through thin (∼5 nm) heavily doped n-type InGaAs layers to reduce contact resistivity. The primary focus of this work is increasing the bandwidth of InP HBTs through the proportional scaling of the device dimensions, both layer thicknesses and junction areas, as well as the reduction of the contact resistivities associated with the