A Thermally Stable Quasi-CMOS Bipolar Logic

Abstract

Logic gates made of pairs of NPN and PNP bipolar transistors, similar to CMOS logic gates, have been proposed and patented long ago but did not find any practical application until now. Other bipolar technologies (TTL, TTL-S, ECL), once the technologies of choice for digital systems, were abandoned and superseded by CMOS. In this paper it is shown that now, when truly complementary pairs of bipolar transistors can be made, properly biased bipolar gates similar to CMOS gates are feasible, can be thermally stable and find practical applications.

VES-BJT: A Lateral Bipolar Transistor on SOI with Polysilicon Emitter and Collector

“…At "1" at the input (i.e., V in = supply voltage), the input current flows from the external source (e.g., another gate) to the ground (positive current in Figure 12b). This is discussed in detail in [27] and illustrated in Figure 13. A unique feature of CBip-based digital circuits is that the same circuit can be used either as an ultra-low power circuit or as a high-performance circuit, and power vs. performance tradeoff can be easily controlled in a working circuit [27].…”

“…Such bipolar inverters were patented long ago [26] but never used. A recent paper [27] shows that thermally stabilized CBip (Complementary Bipolar) inverters and gates can be used for fully functional digital circuits. the inverter (Figure 12).…”

“…A unique feature of CBip-based digital circuits is that the same circuit can be used either as an ultra-low power circuit or as a high-performance circuit, and power vs. performance tradeoff can be easily controlled in a working circuit [27]. Current flow in bipolar inverters (see also [27]).…”