Degeneration of CMOS Power Cells After Hot-Carrier and Load Mismatch Stresses

In this letter, we investigate the performance degradation of nMOS transistors due to hot-carrier effect and load impedance mismatch. The DC and radio-frequency characteristics, such as drain current, threshold voltage, transconductance, output power, power-added efficiency, etc., are affected under hot-carrier effect. With load impedance mismatch, the transistors experience the reflected power from load and increase the energy of hot carriers. This effect will make DC and power performances degenerate heavily. In this letter, device characteristics were measured at 5.2 GHz.

[1]  M. Bourcerie,et al.  Hot-carrier stressing damage in wide and narrow LDD NMOS transistors , 1989, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[2]  Chong-Gun Yu,et al.  RF performance degradation in nMOS transistors due to hot carrier effects , 2000 .

[3]  A.H. Johnston,et al.  MOSFET degradation due to hot-carrier effect at high frequencies , 1990, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[4]  S. Cristoloveanu,et al.  Modeling of the 1/f noise overshoot in short-channel MOSFETs locally degraded by hot-carrier injection , 1989, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[5]  J.S. Yuan,et al.  MOS RF reliability subject to dynamic voltage stress-modeling and analysis , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[6]  J.S. Yuan,et al.  CMOS RF and DC reliability subject to hot carrier stress and oxide soft breakdown , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability.

[7]  Guo-Wei Huang,et al.  Impact of Hot Carrier Stress on RF Power Characteristics of MOSFETs , 2005, IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium Digest, 2005..

[8]  Chih-Ho Tu,et al.  Performance degeneration of CMOS RF power cells after hot-carrier and load mismatch stresses , 2007, 2007 50th Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[9]  J.S. Yuan,et al.  Impact of temperature-accelerated voltage stress on PMOS RF performance , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability.