Rf Circuit Performance Degradation Due To Hot Carrier Effects And Soft Breakdown

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