| As the new applications demand higher and higher speeds BiCMOS technology is emerging as the consensus answer. But, as CMOS has been the stay of semi-conductor industry for more than a decade, the conversion of existing CMOS lines into BiCMOS technology offers a big challenge. Though BiCMOS offers speed advantages over CMOS, CMOS technology would continue to be a major technology, especially for low cost applications. Presently, a majority of the fabrication facilities support CMOS technology and over the past one decade tremendous financial investments have been made in new techniques and innovation in order to accommodate ever-growing new requirements. Also, BiCMOS technology has a major edge over its CMOS counterpart mainly in some selected areas of applications. Its nascent nature won't enable it to replace CMOS spontaneously. Hence, in the near future, semi-conductor technology would witness the co-existence of newly emerging BiCMOS and well-proven and well-tested CMOS technology. This research was undertaken with an objective to explore possible options available for including Bipolar devices. This was to be done with minimum number of extra mask levels. No changes had to be carried out in the CMOS process i.e. it has to be a BiCMOS process based upon pre-designed CMOS process. This study contains all the different options explored to meet the above stated objectives and the performance of these different options has been compared so as to select the best suitable design. |
