Evaluation of silicon-germanium (SiGe) bipolar technologies for use in an upgraded atlas detector

Silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) technologies promise several advantages over CMOS for the front-end readout electronics for the ATLAS upgrade. We have evaluated the relative merits of the latest generations of IBM SiGe HBT BiCMOS technologies, the 8WL and 8HP platforms. These 130nm SiGe technologies show promise to operate at lower power than do CMOS technologies and would provide a viable alternative for the silicon strip detector and liquid argon calorimeter upgrades, provided that the radiation tolerance studies at multiple gamma and neutron irradiation levels, included in this investigation, show them to be sufficiently radiation tolerant.