RF circuit performance degradation due to hot carrier effects and soft breakdown

Author

Xiao, Enjun ; Yuan, J.S.

Author_Institution

Chip Design & Reliability Lab., Central Florida Univ., Orlando, FL, USA

Volume

1

fYear

2002

fDate

4-7 Aug. 2002

Abstract

A methodology to systematically study hot carrier and soft breakdown effects on RF circuits is proposed, and verified with a 2.45GHz low noise amplifier (LNA) and a 1GHz voltage controlled oscillator (VCO). MOSFETs of 0.16 μm technology are stressed, and DC and RF parameters are extracted and used for BERT and SpectreRF simulations to give RF circuit performance degradations due to HC and SBD effects with respect to operation time. Design guidelines for more reliable RF circuits are given after simulation and analysis.

Keywords

MOSFET; UHF amplifiers; UHF oscillators; circuit reliability; hot carriers; semiconductor device breakdown; voltage-controlled oscillators; 0.16 micron; 2.45 GHz; BERT simulation; DC stress; MOSFET; RF circuit design; SpectreRF simulation; hot carrier effect; low noise amplifier; parameter extraction; reliability; soft breakdown; voltage controlled oscillator; Breakdown voltage; Circuit noise; Circuit optimization; Circuit simulation; Degradation; Electric breakdown; Hot carrier effects; Hot carriers; Radio frequency; Voltage-controlled oscillators;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Circuits and Systems, 2002. MWSCAS-2002. The 2002 45th Midwest Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7523-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MWSCAS.2002.1187142

Filename

1187142