RF circuit performance degradation due to soft breakdown and hot-carrier effect in deep-submicrometer CMOS technology

A systematic study of RF circuit performance degradation subject to oxide s oft breakdown (SBD) and hot-carrier (HC) stress is presented in this paper. DC and RE characteristics before and after stress are extracted from the e xperimental data. The effects of SBD and HC stress on s-parameters, cutoff frequency, third-order interception point, and noise parameters are examine d. The performance drifts of gain, noise figure, linearity, and input match ing of the RF low-noise amplifier are demonstrated by SpectreRF simulation results based on measured device data.