A measurement method to mitigate temperature effects in nanometer CMOS RF power amplifiers

We present a measurement method to properly take temperature effects in deep nanometer complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) power amplifiers (PAs) into account. By means of pulsed radio frequency (RF) power measurements the amplifier performance degradation caused by semiconductor self-heating is analyzed and the circuit's thermal time constant is derived. The proposed measurement technique supports automated controlling of equipment and automated data extraction using a Matlab framework. For a 28nm CMOS PA accuracy improvement between simulated and measured data of 5 % in terms of power-added efficiency (PAE) and 2.2 dB in terms of saturated output power is achieved. When applying the proposed measurement technique the active die junction temperature reduces from 105°C to 45°C for saturated operation.