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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 61, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2014
I. I NTRODUCTION
(1)
(2)
0018-9383 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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LEHMANN et al.: CHARACTERIZATION OF THE STATIC THERMAL COUPLING BETWEEN EMITTER FINGERS
3677
(3)
Fig. 2. (a) Cross section of five-finger test structure with equal distance
between adjacent emitter fingers and symmetrically connected emitter fingers.
One common base and one common collector contact is used. (b) Complete
thermal subcircuit of the five-finger structure.
At the sensing emitter finger, a temperature sensitive parameter (TSP) of its electrical characteristics is used to determine
the total temperature increase TS at this location. This allows
calculating the coupling factor of finger H toward finger S
cSH =
(5)
Note, that neither the temperature dependence of the thermal resistances nor the self-heating at the sensing finger is
neglected. This method is designated in the following as heatsense method. In contrast to the linearized VBE sensitivity
used in [6] and [7], this paper employs the emitter current
as TSP. For calibration purposes, the temperature dependence
of the emitter current in forward-gummel biasing has to be
determined and modeled. For the low to medium current range,
a simplified transfer current formulation
VBE
(6)
IE = IES exp
mVT
and a well-known temperature dependence formulation for the
saturation current IES derived from the temperature dependence of the intrinsic carrier density and mobility
TE
VGB TE
IES = IES0
exp
1
(7)
T0
VT T0
are applied. The temperature TE is here the finger temperature
(3) and is considered for the calculation of the thermal
voltage VT and saturation current IES . The saturation current
at nominal temperature IES0 , nonideality factor m, temperature
coefficient , and bandgap voltage VGB are extracted for each
relevant emitter finger or finger combination (in case of shorted
emitter fingers).
A suitable test structure with five emitter fingers is shown
in Fig. 2(a). Each finger is laid out in CBEBC configuration although one common base and one common collector
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 61, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2014
contact pad is used for all fingers. The emitters can be connected separately or, as indicated in the figure, symmetrically
(comparable with [14]). While the latter option saves the space
for two emitter pads on the wafer, it also may be useful if low
thermal coupling is expected, since the according temperature
increase at least can be doubled and allows a more sensitive
determination of coupling factors. In contrast, not all coupling
factors, e.g., c15 , of the thermal subcircuit in Fig. 2(b) can
be extracted for the symmetrically connected test structure
using the heat-sense method. Therefore, an extraction approach
designated as rth -ratio method in the following is applied and
the heat-sense method is slightly adapted, too. The following
assumptions are made for the extraction due to the absence of
any deep trench isolation (DTI).
1) All fingers have the same thermal resistance (which has
been verified in [20])
rth1 (TE ) = rth2 (TE ) = = rth (TE ).
(8)
Pdis,Ea
2
(9)
Pdis,Ea
IE,Ea
VCEa (rE + rCx )
IE,Ea .
2
(10)
TEa
=
.
Pdis,Ea
(13)
(14)
2rth,Ea
1.
rth
(15)
Pdis,Eb
2
Pdis,Eb
.
(17)
2
The first term at the right-hand side of (17) considers the
self-heating of finger 3, whereas the coupled contributions of
the fingers 2 and 4 are represented by the two last terms.
Although often the temperature increase at the sensing device
due to its own power dissipation is neglected, here the selfheating is considered to keep the extraction method applicable
also for medium sensing currents. In contrast, the usually
very low thermally coupled heat fraction of emitter finger 3
toward fingers 2 and 4 is neglected here. Considering the test
structures symmetry, (17) can be rewritten as
+ c34rth (TEb )
(18)
(19)
2TEb
.
(1 + c24 )
(21)
LEHMANN et al.: CHARACTERIZATION OF THE STATIC THERMAL COUPLING BETWEEN EMITTER FINGERS
TABLE I
E XTRACTION S EQUENCE AND D EPENDENCES FOR C OUPLING FACTORS
U SING THE S YMMETRICALLY C ONNECTED F IVE -F INGER T RANSISTOR
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TABLE II
E XTRACTION R ESULTS FOR THE T HERMAL R ESISTANCES
AND
(22)
c14 = c52 =
(24)
Fig. 3.
Coupling factor extraction for the symmetrically connected test
structure MIN with increasing VBEb = Vh to heat finger 2 and 4 at
VCB = [0.5, 1.0, 1.5] V and VBEc = [0.7, 0.725, 0.75, 0.775, 0.8] V for the
sensing currents IEc at Tamb = 300 K. (a) Forward gummel characteristic of
heating current IEb (dashed lines) and sensing emitter current IEc (solid lines).
(b) Reextracted saturation currents (dashed lines), sensed emitter currents
IEc (symbols), and emitter current IEc modeled using saturation current and
temperature increase (solid lines). (c) Temperature increase at the heating
fingers (dashed lines) and at the sensing fingers (solid lines). (d) Coupling
factor for all measurements (solid lines) and averaged value (dashed line)
determined within the range indicated by dotted lines.
rth -ratio method. Note, the extracted values for the double
finger transistors are parameters per double finger.
A coupling factor extraction by the heat-sense method
is shown in detail in Fig. 3 for measurements of the test
structure with the shortest finger length. For this example, the
fingers 2 and 4 are heated simultaneously and the temperature
increase at the enclosed emitter finger 3 is sensed. To get an
idea of the bias dependence of the method, four VBC voltages
are applied generating different ranges of power dissipation
at the heating fingers as well as five VBEc values generating
different levels of power dissipation at the sensing finger. The
resulting sense currents IEc are indicated by the solid lines in
the forward gummel characteristics of the heating fingers in
Fig. 3(a). Fig. 3(b) presents the measured and modeled sense
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 61, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2014
TABLE III
S IMULATION E XPERIMENTS FOR THE LNG S TRUCTURE
Fig. 4. Dependence of the coupling factor c12 on the power dissipation with
VCB = [0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.0] V and VBE,1 = [0.64, 0.66, 0.68, 0.70] V for
the sensing currents IE,1 at T = 300 K. Sudden decrease of a few curves
for transistor LNG 20 mW power dissipation is caused by oscillation issues
being observed with the heating currents.
Fig. 6. Thermal resistance of one emitter finger versus the device temperature TE simulated with GFM for Tamb = [300400] K and P dis =
[0.1, 1.3, 2.5, 3.7, 4.9, 6.1] mW/m2 . Inset: normalized coupling factors
derived from experiment 1 for the applied power dissipation range.
Fig. 5. Extraction results for the devices with single emitter fingers (solid
lines) and the devices with double emitter fingers (dashed lines) shown in
Table II. (a) Determined thermal resistances (circles) and compact model
results using (4) (lines). (b) Determined coupling factors using heat-sense
method (circles) and rth -ratio method (stars).
surface and with planar heat sources and sensors of the size
of the emitter area is used. In addition, sensor domains allow
for additional coupling factor determination versus distance.
The thermal resistances are determined by
rth =
Tmean
Pdis,A
(25)
LEHMANN et al.: CHARACTERIZATION OF THE STATIC THERMAL COUPLING BETWEEN EMITTER FINGERS
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Fig. 8.
Thermal resistance of one single emitter finger versus device
temperature. Results of the initially used (squares) and adapted heat conductivity model (crosses) for the GFM are compared with compact model
results determined from measurements (circles). Simulated power dissipation density per emitter area is similar to that of the measurements P dis
[0.16] mW/m2 .
TABLE IV
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 61, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2014
Fig. 10. Measured collector current densities of the five finger transistor
LNG (triangles, AE0 = 5 0.44 27.8 m2 ) and a single finger transistor
with similar emitter dimensions (circles, AE0 = 1 0.44 27.8 m2 )
at VBE = [0.83, 0.85] V compared with simulations (solid lines). For the
LNG transistor, the respective thermal network is considered.
which have a two orders of magnitude lower thermal conductivity. The thermal resistances can be reproduced within a 5%
error range over device temperature and power dissipation density except for the smallest transistor structure MIN (12%),
which was also manufactured with another wafer run.
As shown in Fig. 9(b) for the coupling factors determined
with the calibrated GFM, a good agreement with the measured
values can be obtained. The deviations of the symmetrically
connected test structure MIN can be explained by the nonlinear
effects and their resulting dependencies during the extraction.
In Fig. 10, the impact of the thermal coupling on the
transistor behavior is shown by measured and modeled output current densities for a single finger and a five finger
transistor (LNG). Since for both devices the emitter finger
sizes are equal, the same electrical compact model is used for
each single finger. For the five finger transistor, the thermal
subcircuit as shown in Fig. 2(b) is used for modeling the
thermal coupling. The resulting higher finger temperatures
generate a significantly higher current density, particularly at
higher power densities. This behavior is also confirmed by
comparison with the measurements.
VII. C ONCLUSION
This paper describes in detail a methodology to determine
thermal coupling between emitter fingers of bipolar transistors
from measurements of test structures. In contrast to the often
LEHMANN et al.: CHARACTERIZATION OF THE STATIC THERMAL COUPLING BETWEEN EMITTER FINGERS
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