Perspective of RF design in future planar and FinFET CMOS

Scaling of CMOS transistors beyond 45 nm requires architectural redesign of the devices. FinFETs are proposed to recover the reduced channel control. This work evaluates the perspective of RF design in planar bulk vs. FinFET SOI for (sub-)45 nm CMOS on a key RF circuit: a low-noise amplifier (LNA). The planar and FinFET devices with channel lengths down to 40 nm are compared in both wideband and narrowband designs up to 14 GHz to illustrate the RF and ESD protection performance perspective. Planar devices push the RF performance. FinFETs lag somewhat behind, but show promising RF performance.