Experimental Investigation of RF Noise Performance Improvement in Graded-Channel MOSFETs

In this paper, measured RF noise performance of graded-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors (GCMOS - also named laterally asymmetric channel transistors) shows impressive reduction in minimum noise figure (NF _min) as compared to classical MOSFET transistors (with the same gate length Lg = 0.5 mum). The reason is proven to be because of the higher noise correlation coefficient (C). GCMOS also shows lower sensitivity to extrinsic thermal noise as compared to classical MOSFET. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the use of 0.5- mum-gate-length GCMOS gives a competitive RF noise performance as compared to 0.25-mum-gate-length classical nMOS transistors.