Sensitivity of single-carrier QAM systems to phase noise arising from the hot-carrier effect

Phase noise is a critical factor that degrades the synchronization performance of a wireless communication receiver. Hot-carriers (HCs), found in the CMOS synchronization devices, are high-energy charge-carriers that can degrade the MOSFET's performance by damaging the internal structure and lead to an increase in the phase noise therein. The increase in the phase noise can be related to a critical parameter, the MOSFET threshold voltage. The HC effect is particularly evident in the short-channel MOSFET devices. In this paper, we analyze the impact of the phase noise arising from the HC effect on the single-carrier QAM systems in terms of the symbol-error-rate (SER) and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). We provide an exact analysis for the SER and SINR degradation for the QPSK systems in the presence of the phase noise, and verify our analytical results through computer simulations. In addition, we illustrate the performance degradation of the single-carrier 16-QAM and 64-QAM systems via Monte Carlo simulations. Through our analysis and simulations, we can show that the SER performance of the QPSK systems can deteriorate by two orders-of-magnitude at an SNR of 10 dB. Our analysis can help the design of receivers for single-carrier wireless systems built on short-channel MOSFET devices

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