Lateral asymmetry in silicon MOSFETs: A new path to improve their microwave noise performance

Field effect transistors feature outstanding noise performance, and one of the fundamental reason being that the (input) gate noise is partially subtracted to the (output) drain noise. If III-V HEMTs strongly take benefit of this unique property, this is not the case for classical Si MOSFETs owing symmetric channel (SY-MOSFETs). In order to overcome this limitation, a new path to improve microwave noise performance of Si MOSFETs -through the use of laterally asymmetric channel- is proposed in this paper. The strong interest of these ldquoLAC-MOSFETsrdquo for low noise/low power applications is shown through a benchmarking of their noise properties/performances with SY-MOSFET and III-V pHEMTs.