Extraction of small-signal equivalent circuit model parameters for Si/SiGe HBT using S-parameters measurements and one geometrical information

A physical and simple method is proposed to extract the hybrid-π small-signal equivalent circuit model of Si/SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT). In this method, we use test (dummy) structures to extract by means of fitting techniques the extrinsic bias-independent parameters representing the contact pads plus the transmission line connections to the core of the active device. All intrinsic bias-dependent parameters are calculated analytically from S-parameters only. The ratio of the area of the emitter contact to base area is used to solve the base–collector feedback problem due to the distributed nature of the base. Using this physical (geometry) constraint instead of the measured direct current (DC) information helps to get more reliable parameters and easier calculations. When we applied this methodology, a good agreement is obtained between the modelled S-parameters with the corresponding measured ones over the broad band from 40 MHz to 20.02 GHz. The error for three different bias points was less than 1.2%.