Impact of transistor aging on RF low noise amplifier performance of 28nm technology: Reliability assessment

Transistor reliability has become one of the major concerns in reliable circuit design in advanced CMOS nanometer technology. Transistor aging can have a significant impact on the performance of the RF frontend circuits. In this paper, the impacts of transistor aging on a RF low noise amplifier (LNA) are studied. In this work, single-ended cascode LNA with source inductive degeneration and LC folded-cascode LNA test circuits are used to study the transistor aging effect. The noise figure (NF) and the gain, critical performance parameters of a LNA are shown to be degradation-sensitive. It is shown that the noise figure of the LNA is significantly increased and the gain of the LNA is decreased by the aging effect using a 28nm technology. The optimum gate bias point and the cascode structure have been shown as design guidelines to make the LNA more reliable.