CMOS 65 nm wideband LNA reliability estimation

Radio frequency (RF) products are very demanding in terms of technology developments. Reliability will be one of the most important challenges for the semiconductor industry during the following years. This work presents a wideband low noise amplifier (WBLNA) designed in CMOS 65 nm, its model for reliability estimation, and simulated results of fresh and aged devices. The WBLNA failure, defined in this work as the amount of degradation to have 3 dB gain loss or 10% bandwidth reduction, has been found for HCI I_D, SBD and EM degradations. The most important simulated reliability degradation results have been highlighted. Therefore, the design for reliability concept can be systematically applied in the RF front-end circuits, and it has helped with WBLNA reliability improvement.