RF circuit performance degradation due to soft breakdown and hot-carrier effect in deep-submicrometer CMOS technology

Author

Li, Qiang ; Zhang, Jinlong ; Li, Wei ; Yuan, Jiann S. ; Chen, Yuan ; Oates, Anthony S.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, FL., USA

Volume

49

Issue

9

fYear

2001

fDate

9/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1546

Lastpage

1551

Abstract

A systematic study of RF circuit performance degradation subject to oxide soft breakdown (SBD), and hot-carrier (HC) stress is presented in this paper. DC and RF characteristics before and after stress are extracted from the experimental data. The effects of SBD and HC stress on s-parameters, cutoff frequency, third-order interception point, and noise parameters are examined. The performance drifts of gain, noise figure, linearity, and input matching of the RF low-noise amplifier are demonstrated by SpectreRF simulation results based on measured device data

Keywords

CMOS analogue integrated circuits; S-parameters; electric breakdown; hot carriers; integrated circuit noise; radiofrequency amplifiers; RF circuit; RF low-noise amplifier; S-parameters; SpectreRF simulation; cutoff frequency; deep-submicron CMOS technology; gain; hot carrier stress; input matching; linearity; noise figure; soft breakdown; third-order intercept point; Circuit noise; Circuit optimization; Cutoff frequency; Data mining; Degradation; Electric breakdown; Hot carriers; Radio frequency; Scattering parameters; Stress;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9480

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/22.942565

Filename

942565