Performance of the SiGe HBT 8HP and 8WL technologies after high dose/fluence radiation exposure

An assessment of the radiation tolerance of the latest generation IBM silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) technologies (SiGe 8WL and SiGe 8HP) at extreme dose/fluence is reported. These BiCMOS technologies are of great interest for analog readout circuits in high energy physics detectors, especially the planned upgrade of the ATLAS detector for the upgraded Large Hadron Collider (sLHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. These third-generation, 130 nm SiGe HBTs show promise to operate at lower power than CMOS circuits provided that they can be shown to be sufficiently radiation tolerant. This study presents evidence of the radiation tolerance of these two candidate technologies with parametric measurements after irradiation up to a fluence of 10¹⁶ 1 MeV equivalent neutrons/cm² and a gamma dose of 100 Mrad (SiO2).