SiGe ( or ), or silicon–germanium, is an alloy with any molar ratio of silicon and germanium, i.e. with a molecular formula of the form Si1−xGex. It is commonly used as a semiconductor material in integrated circuits (ICs) for heterojunction bipolar transistors or as a strain-inducing layer for CMOS transistors. IBM introduced the technology into mainstream manufacturing in 1989. This relatively new technology offers opportunities in mixed-signal circuit and analog circuit IC design and manufacture. SiGe is also used as a thermoelectric material for high-temperature applications (>700 K).
SiGe ( or ), or silicon–germanium, is an alloy with any molar ratio of silicon and germanium, i.e. with a molecular formula of the form Si1−xGex. It is commonly used as a semiconductor material in integrated circuits (ICs) for heterojunction bipolar transistors or as a strain-inducing layer for CMOS transistors. IBM introduced the technology into mainstream manufacturing in 1989. This relatively new technology offers opportunities in mixed-signal circuit and analog circuit IC design and manufacture. SiGe is also used as a thermoelectric material for high-temperature applications (>700 K).
==History== The first paper on SiGe was published in 1955 on the magnetoresistance of silicon germanium alloys. The first mention of SiGe devices was actually in the original patent for the bipolar transistor where the idea of a SiGe base in a heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) was discussed with a description of the physics in the 1957. The first epitaxial growth of SiGe heterostructures which is required for a transistor was not demonstrated until 1975 by Erich Kasper and colleagues at the AEG Research Centre (now Daimler Benz) in Ulm, Germany using molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).