Hot carrier and soft breakdown effects on VCO perfomance

Author

Enjun Xiao ; Yuan, J.S.

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

fYear

2002

fDate

3-4 June 2002

Firstpage

459

Lastpage

462

Abstract

This paper systematically investigates the hot carrier and soft-breakdown induced performance degradation in a CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator used in phase locked loop frequency synthesizers. After deriving the closed-form equations to predict phase noise and VCO gain, we relate VCO RF performance such as phase noise, tuning range and gain of VCO subject to electrical stress. The circuit degradations predicted by analytical model equations are verified by SpectraRF simulation using parameters extracted from the experimental data of 0.16 /spl mu/m CMOS technology.

Keywords

CMOS analogue integrated circuits; UHF integrated circuits; UHF oscillators; circuit simulation; hot carriers; integrated circuit modelling; integrated circuit noise; phase noise; thermal noise; timing jitter; voltage-controlled oscillators; CMOS VCO; PLL frequency synthesizers; RF performance degradation; SpectraRF simulation; VCO gain; closed-form equations; electrical stress; hot carrier effects; mobility degradation; phase noise; ring oscillator; soft breakdown effects; tuning range; Analytical models; CMOS technology; Degradation; Electric breakdown; Equations; Hot carriers; Performance gain; Phase locked loops; Phase noise; Voltage-controlled oscillators;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, 2002 IEEE

Conference_Location

Seattle, WA, USA

ISSN

1529-2517

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7246-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/RFIC.2002.1012091

Filename

1012091