Silicon-Germanium as an Enabling IC Technology for Extreme Environment Electronics

Extreme environments" represents an important niche venue for electronic components, and spans the operation of electronics in surroundings lying outside the domain of conventional commercial and military specifications. Such extreme environments would include, for instance, operation down to very low temperatures (e.g., to 77 K or even 4.2 K), 2) operation up to very high temperatures (e.g., to 200degC or even 300degC), 3) operation across very wide and cyclic temperature swings, and 4) operation in a radiation-rich environment (e.g., space), or even all four simultaneously. We have previously argued that the unique bandgap-engineered features of SiGe HBTs offer great utility to simultaneously satisfy all four of these extreme environment domains, potentially with little or no process modification, ultimately providing compelling advantages at the IC and system level, across a wide class of commercial and defense applications. In the present work, we detail the application of SiGe technology for building electronic components of interest to NASA and the space community for operation in one of the "classic" extreme environments - on the lunar surface.