Title :
RF circuit performance degradation due to soft breakdown and hot carrier effect in 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology
Author :
Qiang Li ; Jinlong Zhang ; Wei Li ; Yuan, J.S. ; Yuan Chen ; Oates, A.S.
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Univ. of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
Abstract :
A systematic study of RF circuit performance degradation subject to soft oxide breakdown (SBD) and hot carrier (HC) stress is demonstrated. Device parameters before and after stress are extracted from the experimental data of 0.18 pm CMOS technology. The effects of SBD and HC degradations on f/sub T/, f/sub max/, third-order interception point and the four noise parameters (F/sub min/, R/sub n/, G/sub 0pt/ and B/sub 0pt/) of an RF device have been studied. Since the figures of merit for the RF circuit characterization are gain, noise figure, linearity and input matching, the RF low noise amplifier (LNA) performance drift is evaluated for these features. The predicted the degradation trend from our experimental and simulation results can help design reliable CMOS RFICs.
Keywords :
CMOS integrated circuits; UHF amplifiers; UHF integrated circuits; hot carriers; integrated circuit noise; semiconductor device breakdown; 0.18 micron; 2.45 GHz; CMOS RFICs; RF LNA performance drift; RF circuit characterization; RF circuit performance degradation; RF low noise amplifier; cutoff frequency; deep submicron CMOS technology; figures of merit; gain; hot carrier stress; input matching; linearity; noise figure; noise parameters; soft oxide breakdown; third-order interception point; CMOS technology; Circuit noise; Circuit optimization; Data mining; Degradation; Electric breakdown; Hot carriers; Noise figure; Radio frequency; Stress;
Conference_Titel :
Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium, 2001. Digest of Papers. 2001 IEEE
Conference_Location :
Phoenix, AZ, USA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-6601-8
DOI :
10.1109/RFIC.2001.935661
