Fabrication process for narrow emitter along 010 direction in heterojunction bipolar transistor fully drawn by electron beam lithography was studied. Emitter structure of a 100 nm width was formed by using epitaxial structure with 30-nm-thick InP layer of emitter. Transistor operation of devices with 0.5-µ m-wide emitter was confirmed. This process can be applied to a buried metal heterojunction bipolar transistor (BM-HBT) with narrow emitter, resulting in high-speed operation of BM-HBT.

Narrow emitter effects in self-aligned bipolar transistors are discussed. Besides the increase of a non-ideal base current, the decrease of an ideal base current is newly observed, and a consequent fluctuation of the current gain becomes wider in the smaller emitter geometry. Both phenomena are attributed to the reduction of an emitter-impurity concentration.