RF Circuit Designs for Reliability and Process Variability Resilience

Download or read book RF Circuit Designs for Reliability and Process Variability Resilience written by Ekavut Kritchanchai and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CMOS devices are scaled down and beyond pose significant process variability and reliability issues. Negative biased temperature instability (NBTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI) are well-known aging phenomena that degrade transistor and circuit performance. Yield analysis and optimization, which takes into account the manufacturing tolerances, model uncertainties, variations in the process parameters, and aging factors are known as indispensable components of the circuit design procedure. Process variability issues become more predominant as the feature size decreases. With these insights provided, reliability and variability evaluations on typical RF circuits and possible compensation techniques are highly desirable. In this work, a class F power amplifier was designed and evaluated using TSMC 0.18 [micrometer] RF technology. The PA’s output power and power-added efficiency were evaluated using the ADS simulation. Physical insight of transistor operation in the RF circuit environment was examined using the Sentaurus mixed-mode device and circuit simulation. The hot electron effect and device self-heating degraded the output power and power-added efficiency of the power amplifier, especially when both the input transistor and output transistor suffered high impact ionization rates and lattice heating.