BiCMOS

BiCMOS is an evolved semiconductor technology that integrates two formerly separate semiconductor technologies, those of the bipolar junction transistor and the CMOS transistor, in a single integrated circuit device.

Bipolar junction transistors offer high speed, high gain, and low output resistance, which are excellent properties for high-frequency analog amplifiers, whereas CMOS technology offers high input resistance and is excellent for constructing simple, low-power logic gates. For as long as the two types of transistors have existed in production, designers of circuits utilizing discrete components have realized the advantages of integrating the two technologies; however, lacking implementation in integrated circuits, the application of this free-form design was restricted to fairly simple circuits. Discrete circuits of hundreds or thousands of transistors quickly expand to occupy hundreds or thousands of square centimeters of circuit board area, and for very high-speed circuits such as those used in modern digital computers, the distance between transistors (and the minimum capacitance of the connections between them) also makes the desired speeds grossly unattainable, so that if these designs cannot be built as integrated circuits, then they simply cannot be built.

In the 1990s, modern integrated circuit fabrication technologies began to make BiCMOS a reality. This technology rapidly found application in amplifiers and analog power management circuits, and has some advantages in digital logic. BiCMOS circuits use the characteristics of each type of transistor most appropriately. Generally this means that high current circuits use metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFETs) for efficient control, and portions of specialized very high performance circuits use bipolar devices. Examples of this include radio frequency (RF) oscillators, bandgap-based references and low-noise circuits.

The Pentium, Pentium Pro, and SuperSPARC microprocessors also used BiCMOS.

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