Thermal Considerations on RF Reliability and Aging in SOI CMOS Based Power Amplifiers

The thermal behavior and its effect on RF large signal aging is extensively studied using a QFN-packaged 22FDX Power Amplifier (PA). While no strong dependence due to temperature on t0 RF metrics is seen, DC Iddq increases in the linear region with no significant change in the compression region. RF long term aging at three different V
DD
and junction temperature TJ is also studied under an accelerated state. Thermal characterization is performed, and junction temperatures are extracted using TCAD-based thermal modeling. These results also validate ambient TA vs T
J
correlation at P
diss
. Time domain peak voltage swings at different T
J
demonstrate that Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) and off-state TDDB are key degradation mechanisms, with voltage as primary and temperature as secondary acceleration parameters demonstrating excellent thermal behavior for SOI based Power Amplifiers.