Ultimate Speed of Bipolar Devices: Will the Gap Between CMOS and Bipolar be Maintained?

摘要

The history of integrated circuits started with bipolar technology. During the 70's the complementary MOS technology (CMOS) arose. This silicon technology was restricted first to slow but very low power watch circuits. Since this time the market share of CMOS products increased a lot. Today this technology can be regarded as the mainstream technology worldwide for digital integrated circuits. For quite a long time it was thought that bipolar even would be pushed out of its designated market segments namely high speed IC products. In recent years, however, a renaissance of bipolar technology occured due to a lot of technology innovations just to name the polysilicon emitter and novel self-alignment schemes. Thus today the question is again open for discussion where the borderline of application areas has to be drawn for bipolar and CMOS. The presentation gives a state of the art review of bipolar technology and proves its unique speed advantage by demonstrator circuits and products. It is shown that already today 10 Gbit/s systems can be done in silicon bipolar. The perspectives of this technology are summarized next. Bipolar and CMOS performances are compared then with respect to speed and power dissipation in a general way. Finally the application areas for CMOS and bipolar are split up based on this reasoning.