Impact of Microwave Interference on Dynamic Operation and Power Dissipation of CMOS Inverters

The effects of electromagnetic interference (EMI) from high-power microwave signals on CMOS inverters are reported. In order to study these effects more effectively, a novel analytical parameter extraction method, which allows us to predict the dynamic operation of the inverters under interference from experimentally measured load-line characteristics, is developed. Based on the method, the output voltages, output short-circuit currents, propagation delays, and dynamic power dissipation during EMI were extracted. The results showed that the inverters suffer severely from compressed output voltage swing, bit errors, significant changes in the propagation delays, and substantially increased short-circuit currents, as well as a large increase in dynamic power dissipation during logic state transition from high to low and vice versa. Scaling down of the inverters showed that such operational parameters of the devices were more strongly affected by the interference, resulting in significantly more vulnerable CMOS inverters.