An overview of device behavior and modeling of CMOS technology for RF IC design

This paper overviews the MOS downscaling and device behavior in RF CMOS technology, which is an attractive potential process candidate for wireless communication applications. The impact of downscaling of CMOS technology to the RF applications will be discussed first. Then the trend of the device performance will be summarized to understand the device behavior better for RF design requirements. Several important figure-of-merits for MOS transistors such as cutoff frequency (f^max, noise figure (NF) and linearity etc. will be analyzed together with the discussion of other device behavior to explore the details of RF CMOS technology. Modeling issues are also introduced to develop good RF models for RF circuit optimization.