RF circuit design in reliability

A methodology for designing reliable RF circuits is proposed. A model to predict hot carrier and soft breakdown effects on CMOS device parameters in RF circuits is developed. Hot carrier and soft breakdown effects are evaluated experimentally with 0.16 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. Device stress measurement and SpectreRF simulation are conducted to evaluate the impact of hot carrier and soft breakdown effects on RF circuits such as low noise amplifier and voltage-controlled oscillator performance. Two design techniques to build reliable RF circuits are proposed and verified.