SiGe BiCMOS Technology: An IC Design Platform for Extreme Environment Electronics Applications

The drivers in the extreme environment electronics community are beginning to perk up their ears to the possibilities of using SiGe technology, especially for space electronics applications. The present NASA-funded project, "SiGe integrated electronics for extreme environments," which is aimed at enabling more effective lunar exploration, represents a 'first' of sorts - a chance to develop the requisite SiGe infrastructure; from technology, to characterization tools, to modeling, to circuit design, to packaging, to reliability, to functional sub-systems, needed to support the development and eventual insertion of SiGe into emerging extreme environment venues. The authors are excited about our progress, and firmly believe that the greater electronics community can and should leverage this effort for a wide variety of their applications. Ensuring adequate reliability for SiGe technologies in these new application venues will require more effort from the reliability community. Initial results look very promising indeed.