0.15-MU-M RF CMOS TECHNOLOGY COMPATIBLE WITH LOGIC CMOS FOR LOW-VOLTAGE OPERATION

Radio Frequency (RF) CMOS is expected to replace bipolar and GaAs MESF ET's in RF front-end IC's for mobile telecommunications devices in the near future, In order for the RF CMOS to be popularly used in this ap plication, compatibility of its process for high-speed logic CMOS and low supply voltage operation are important for low fabrication cost an d low power consumption, In this paper, a 0.15-mu m RF CMOS technology compatible with logic CMOS for low-voltage operation is described, Be cause the fabrication process is the same as the high-speed logic CMOS , manufacturibility of this technology is excellent, Some of the passi ve elements can be integrated without changing the process and others can be integrated with the addition of a few optional processes, Mixed RF and logic CMOS devices in a one-chip LSI can be realized with rela tively low cost, Excellent high-frequency characteristics of small geo metry silicon MOSFET's with low-power supply voltage are demonstrated, Cutoff frequency of 42 GHz of n-MOSFET's, which is almost the same le vel at that of general high-performance silicon bipolar transistors, w as obtained, N-MOSFET's maintained enough high cutoff frequency of 32 GHZ even at extremely low supply voltage of 0.5 V. Moreover, it was co nfirmed that degradation of minimum noise figure for deep submicron MO SFET's with 0.5 V operation is sufficiently small compared with 2.0 V operation, These excellent high-frequency characteristics of small geo metry silicon MOSFET's under low-voltage operation are suitable for mo bile telecommunications applications.