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BiCMOS is a good choice for RF design but not a good choice for baseband circuit. As for the price consideration, 0.25um CMOS cost roughly the same with 0.35um SiGe.
Sure, there are some RFIC providers using BiCMOS. For a system-in-package design, you can use SiGe for RF and CMOS for the other circuits.
Most of the industries uses BiCMOSfor thei produts, as nj_jack said.
Be aware that there could be a great difference between what is written in IEEE, JSSC and what is a product. Because the aim is different: JSSC needs a step more on state of the art to publish the article, a product makes MONEY!
For example (RF parts): Nokia uses a lot STM BiCMOS processes.
TI, Samsung, Motorola etc. use it
If you see RF (silicon, of course), most probably there is BiCMOS in it.
I confirm what Mazz says, still, almost all worldwide corporates (US+European+Japanese) use BiCMOS for RF applications. From my experience I can also say that very unlikely these companies will migrate to pure CMOS before next generation of products which will happen around 2009.
Nathan
what I've seen in recent years is shift of use of CMOS for RF. The discussion is still open, but...
The use of a certain process is only economic-based: today is typical to see baseband products in .13u with RF tranceivers in 0.35BiCMOS, and the BiCMOS costs LESS. Baseband move very fast to smaller processes as there are big advantages, while for RF is difficult to say what will happen. Cost is related to masks, volumes and so on.
There are a lot of different developments: SOI, CMOS with NPN in SiGe at low cost, SiGe BiCMOS, use of carbon based transistors just to say a few.
In my opinion a statement as "CMOS will be used in 2009" is really really difficult to say...
Just my opinion.
Mazz
so for low performance applications (bluetooth, WLAN) you can use CMOS, but for high performance (some cell phone, some optical, others) you still have to use SiGe BiCMOS.
so nathan and mazz, you know as a fact about STMicro's SiGe process technology ? which companies do you know that use it as a fact ?
i was aware of the difference between what JSSC and ISSCC say about CMOS, but was not aware of the gap. I have heard from others, that there is a 10 year difference (estimate) between research in papers in a technology (say GaAs HEMT/pHEMT) and introduction in industry. CMOS should be no different.
i recently heard ST was getting out of SiGe altogether, don't know if that is true.
about CMOS, i also hear that broadcom is great at baseband, not at the RF front end, while qualcomm is well good at everything! qualcomm is already using CMOS in cell phone chips (don't know how much RF though) and so is broadcom (apparently). as far as i know qualcomm and broadcom push RF CMOS the most, and i have yet to see volume products apart from Atheros, and also oh yes, Silicon Labs.
More comments welcome, i want to know what companies use what processes !
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