High frequency performance of SiC heterojunction bipolar transistors

Abstract

A compact heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) model was employed to simulate the high frequency and high power performances of SiC-based bipolar transistors. Potential 6H-SiC/3C-SiC heterojunction bipolar transistors (6H/3C-HBT's) at case temperatures of 27/spl deg/C (300 K) through 600/spl deg/C (873 K) were investigated. The high frequency and high power performance was compared to AlGaAs/GaAs HBT's. As expected, the ohmic contact resistance limits the high frequency performance of the SiC HBT. At the present time, it is only possible to reliably produce 1/spl times/10/sup -4/ /spl Omega/-cm/sup 2/ contact resistances on SiC, so an f/sub T/ of 4.4 GHz and an f/sub max/ of 3.2 GHz are the highest realistic values. However, assuming an incredibly low 1/spl times/10/sup -6/ /spl Omega/-cm/sup 2/ contact resistance for the emitter, base, and collector terminals, an f/sub T/ of 31.1 GHz and an f/sub max/ of 12.7 GHz can be obtained for a 6H/3C-SiC HBT.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>