RF circuit performance degradation due to soft breakdown and hot carrier effect in 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology

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.