1.5 V Low-Voltage Microwave Power Performance of InAlAs/InGaAs Double Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors

In this paper, we report the first demonstration of microwave power performance of InAlAs/InGaAs double heterojunction bipolar transistors (DHBTs) obtained at an extremely low operating voltage of 1.5 V. In order to obtain a high output power (P out) at a low operating voltage, we used DHBTs rather than single heterojunction bipolar transistors (SHBTs) and thus reduced the offset voltage (V CE,offset). We obtained a much lower V CE,offset of 50 mV for the DHBT than that of 300 mV for a SHBT. At a low operation voltage of 1.5 V, the DHBT exhibited a P out of 20.6 dBm with a power added efficiency (η add) of 36.6% and a power gain (G a) of 8.5 dB biased for class-B operation at 1.9 GHz. The high-speed performance of the DHBT are a unity cutoff frequency (f T) of 76 GHz and a maximum oscillation frequency (f max) of 157 GHz. We also studied the reliability of DHBTs by conducting a 1000-hour accelerated life test. The InGaAs HBTs had a lifetime of 2×106 h at a junction temperature of 125°C with an activation energy of 0.95 eV.