Investigation of AlInAs/GaInAs heterostructure-emitter-confinement bipolar transistors

In this paper, the performances of AlInAs/GaInAs heterostructure-emitter-confinement bipolar transistors including heterostructure-emitter bipolar transistors (HEBT) and superlattice-confinement bipolar transistors (SCBT) are demonstrated. Due to the elimination of the potential spike at the emitter-base junction, extremely low offset voltages of 40 and 80 mV are obtained for the studied HEBT and SCBT respectively. For the HEBT, due to the small hole diffusion length and the targe neutral-emitter recombination current, a degraded current gain performance is observed. On the other hand, the SCBT exhibits a large differential current gain of 240 resulting from tunnelling injection which can reduce the spread of thermal distribution and the non-radiative recombination cross-section.