Analytic Estimation of Thermal Resistance in HBTs

In this paper, we propose a new method for estimating the peak junction temperature and thermal resistance in modern heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). The proposed method uses the temperature dependence of thermal conductivity of the material. The method is analytic in nature and does not require any iteration as opposed to the existing state-of-the-art model. This analytic method can easily include the available scaling relations relevant to specific technology to estimate the junction temperatures and thermal resistances of the corresponding transistors. The analytic model is tested against iterative self-consistent solutions for simple structures without any trench isolation and for structures corresponding to the ST Microelectronics B9MW technology that includes shallow and deep trench isolations. The model is slightly modified in order to include the effects from the back-end-of-line metal layers. The resulting analytic model is validated against the measured results for silicon germanium HBTs fabricated in ST Microelectronics B9MW technology.