Study of Electrical Stress Effect on SiGe HBT Low-Noise Amplifier Performance by Simulation

This paper investigates the hot-carrier-induced performance degradation in a cascode low-noise amplifier using SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors. Changes in device characteristics due to accelerated hot-carrier stress are examined experimentally. The vertical bipolar inter-company (VBIC) model parameters extracted from measured device data before and after stress are used in Cadence SpectreRF simulation to evaluate the circuit performance degradation