The semiconductor industry is a fundamental building block of the new economy, there is no area of modern life untouched by the progress of nanoelectronics. The electronic chip is becoming an ever-increasing portion of system solutions, starting initially from less than 5% in the 1970 microcomputer era, to more than 60% of the final cost of a mobile telephone, 50% of the price of a personal computer (representing nearly 100% of the functionalities) and 30% of the price of a monitor in the early 2000's.
Interest in utilizing the (sub-)mm-wave frequency spectrum for commercial and research applications has also been steadily increasing. Such applications, which constitute a diverse but sizeable future market, span a large variety of areas such as health, material science, mass transit, industrial automation, communications, and space exploration.
Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors for mm-Wave Systems Technology, Modeling and Circuit Applications provides an overview of results of the DOTSEVEN EU research project, and as such focusses on key material developments for mm-Wave Device Technology. It starts with the motivation at the beginning of the project and a summary of its major achievements. The subsequent chapters provide a detailed description of the obtained research results in the various areas of process development, device simulation, compact device modeling, experimental characterization, reliability, (sub-)mm-wave circuit design and systems.
Rinaldi, Niccolò: - Niccolo Rinaldi graduated (cum laude) from the University of Naples "Federico II," Italy, in 1990, and received the Ph.D. degree in 1994. In February 1994, he became a Research Assistant at the University of Naples "Federico II." From July 1996 to December 1996, he was Research Fellow at the University of Delft, The Netherlands, working on the modeling of high-speed bipolar devices. In November 1998 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Naples "Federico II." Since November 2002 he has been Full Professor at the University of Naples. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Bipolar/BICMOS Circuits and Technology Meeting, and vice-chairman of the IEEE Electron Device Chapter (Central & South Italy Section). From 2009 to 2013 he was Coordinator of the Ph.D. program in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering. From 2010 to 2012 he was the Coordinator of the Italian Ph.D. School in Electronics Engineering. In 2012 he was awarded the Medal of Meritorious from the Technical University of Lodz (Poland). He was a workpackage leader in the European Projects DOTFIVE and DOTSEVEN. His present research interests include the modeling of bipolar and power MOS transistors, self-heating effects in solid-state circuits and devices, electro-thermal simulation, and design of RF and microwave circuits and devices. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications in international journals and conferences.
Schröter, Michael: - Michael Schroeter received his Dr.-Ing. degree (scl) in electrical engineering and the "venia legendi" on semiconductor devices in 1988 and 1994, respectively, from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He was with Nortel and Bell Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada, as a Team Leader and Advisor until 1996 when he joined Rockwell (later Conexant), Newport Beach (CA), where he managed the RF Device Modeling Group. Dr. Schroeter has been a Full Professor at the University of Technology at Dresden, Germany, since 1999, and has an adjunct affiliation with UC San Diego, USA. He is the author of the bipolar transistor compact model HICUM, a worldwide standard since 2003, and has co-authored a textbook entitled "Compact hierarchical modeling of bipolar transistors with HICUM" as well as over 220 peer reviewed publications and four invited book chapters. Dr. Schroeter was a co-founder of XMOD Technologies in Bordeaux, France. During a two-year Leave of Absence from TUD (2009-2011) he was the Vice President of RF Engineering at RFNano, where he was responsible for the device design of the first 4" wafer-scale carbon nanotube FET process technology. He was the Technical Project Manager for DOTFIVE (2008-2011) and DOTSEVEN (2012-2016), which were EU funded research projects for advancing high-speed SiGe HBT technology towards THz applications, and has been leading the Carbon Path project within the German Excellence Cluster CfAED. Since 2013, he has been a member of the ITRS/IRDS RF-AMS subcommittee.
