Evaluation of oscillator phase noise subject to reliability

This paper systematically investigates the hot carrier (HC) and soft-breakdown (SBD) induced performance degradations in CMOS voltage-controlled oscillators. After the MOSFET device RF parameter degradations due to HC and SBD effects are experimentally evaluated, the HC and SBD induced performance degradations of a differential 5-stage ring oscillator and a cross-coupled LC oscillator are evaluated for the first time for 0.16 /spl mu/m technology, focusing on phase noise. Two design techniques are proposed to improve the oscillator performance. The SpectraRF and BERT simulation results verified the effectiveness of the proposed design techniques.