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 soft breakdown (SBD), and hot-carrier (HC) stress is presented in this paper. DC and RF characteristics before and after stress are extracted from the experimental data. The effects of SBD and HC stress on s-parameters, cutoff frequency, third-order interception point, and noise parameters are examined. The performance drifts of gain, noise figure, linearity, and input matching of the RF low-noise amplifier are demonstrated by SpectreRF simulation results based on measured device data.