CMOS devices are scaled down and beyond pose significant process variability and reliability issues. Negative biased temperature instability (NBTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI) are well-known aging phenomena that degrade transistor and circuit performance. Yield analysis and optimization, which takes into account the manufacturing tolerances, model uncertainties, variations in the process parameters, and aging factors are known as indispensable components of the circuit design procedure. Process variability issues become more predominant as the feature size decreases. With these insights provided, reliability and variability evaluations on typical RF circuits and possible compensation techniques are highly desirable. In this work, a class F power amplifier was designed and evaluated using TSMC 0.18 [micrometer] RF technology. The PA’s output power and power-added efficiency were evaluated using the ADS simulation. Physical insight of transistor operation in the RF circuit environment was examined using the Sentaurus mixed-mode device and circuit simulation. The hot electron effect and device self-heating degraded the output power and power-added efficiency of the power amplifier, especially when both the input transistor and output transistor suffered high impact ionization rates and lattice heating.

The subject of this book is CMOS RF circuit design for reliability. The device reliability and process variation issues on RF transmitter and receiver circuits will be particular interest to the readers in the field of semiconductor devices and circuits. This proposed book is unique to explore typical reliability issues in the device and technology level and then to examine their impact on RF wireless transceiver circuit performance. Analytical equations, experimental data, device and circuit simulation results will be given for clear explanation. The main benefit the reader derive from this book will be clear understanding on how device reliability issues affects the RF circuit performance subjected to operation aging and process variations.

Due to continued device dimensions scaling, CMOS transistors in the nanometer regime have resulted in major reliability and variability challenges. Reliability issues such as channel hot electron injection, gate dielectric breakdown, and negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) need to be accounted for in the design of robust RF circuits. In addition, process variations in the nanoscale CMOS transistors are another major concern in today's circuits design. An adaptive gate-source biasing scheme to improve the RF circuit reliability is presented in this work. The adaptive method automatically adjusts the gate-source voltage to compensate the reduction in drain current subjected to various device reliability mechanisms. A class-AB RF power amplifier shows that the use of a source resistance makes the power-added efficiency robust against threshold voltage and mobility variations, while the use of a source inductance is more reliable for the input third-order intercept point. A RF power amplifier with adaptive gate biasing is proposed to improve the circuit device reliability degradation and process variation. The performances of the power amplifier with adaptive gate biasing are compared with those of the power amplifier without adaptive gate biasing technique. The adaptive gate biasing makes the power amplifier more resilient to process variations as well as the device aging such as mobility and threshold voltage degradation. Injection locked voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) have been examined. The VCOs are implemented using TSMC 0.18 [micrometer] mixed-signal CMOS technology. The injection locked oscillators have improved phase noise performance than free running oscillators. A differential Clapp-VCO has been designed and fabricated for the evaluation of hot electron reliability. The differential Clapp-VCO is formed using cross-coupled nMOS transistors, on-chip transformers/inductors, and voltage-controlled capacitors. The experimental data demonstrate that the hot carrier damage increases the oscillation frequency and degrades the phase noise of Clapp-VCO. A p-channel transistor only VCO has been designed for low phase noise. The simulation results show that the phase noise degrades after NBTI stress at elevated temperature. This is due to increased interface states after NBTI stress. The process variability has also been evaluated.

The work presents a novel voltage biasing design that helps the CMOS RF circuits resilient to variability and reliability. The biasing scheme provides resilience through the threshold voltage (V[subscript T) adjustment, and at the mean time it does not degrade the PA performance. Analytical equations are established for sensitivity of the resilient biasing under various scenarios. Power Amplifier (PA) and Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) are investigated case by case through modeling and experiment. PTM 65nm technology is adopted in modeling the transistors within these RF blocks. A traditional class-AB PA with resilient design is compared the same PA without such design in PTM 65nm technology. Analytical equations are established for sensitivity of the resilient biasing under various scenarios. A traditional class-AB PA with resilient design is compared the same PA without such design in PTM 65nm technology. The results show that the biasing design helps improve the robustness of the PA in terms of linear gain, P1dB, Psat, and power added efficiency (PAE). Except for post-fabrication calibration capability, the design reduces the majority performance sensitivity of PA by 50% when subjected to threshold voltage (V[subscript T]) shift and 25% to electron mobility ([mu subscript n]) degradation. The impact of degradation mismatches is also investigated. It is observed that the accelerated aging of MOS transistor in the biasing circuit will further reduce the sensitivity of PA. In the study of LNA, a 24 GHz narrow band cascade LNA with adaptive biasing scheme under various aging rate is compared to LNA without such biasing scheme. The modeling and simulation results show that the adaptive substrate biasing reduces the sensitivity of noise figure and minimum noise figure subject to process variation and device aging such as threshold voltage shift and electron mobility degradation. Simulation of different aging rate also shows that the sensitivity of LNA is further reduced with the accelerated aging of the biasing circuit. Thus, for majority RF transceiver circuits, the adaptive body biasing scheme provides overall performance resilience to the device reliability induced degradation. Also the tuning ability designed in RF PA and LNA provides the circuit post-process calibration capability.

This book describes several techniques to address variation-related design challenges for analog blocks in mixed-signal systems-on-chip. The methods presented are results from recent research works involving receiver front-end circuits, baseband filter linearization, and data conversion. These circuit-level techniques are described, with their relationships to emerging system-level calibration approaches, to tune the performances of analog circuits with digital assistance or control. Coverage also includes a strategy to utilize on-chip temperature sensors to measure the signal power and linearity characteristics of analog/RF circuits, as demonstrated by test chip measurements. Describes a variety of variation-tolerant analog circuit design examples, including from RF front-ends, high-performance ADCs and baseband filters; Includes built-in testing techniques, linked to current industrial trends; Balances digitally-assisted performance tuning with analog performance tuning and mismatch reduction approaches; Describes theoretical concepts as well as experimental results for test chips designed with variation-aware techniques.

CMOS RF circuit design has been an ever-lasting research field. It gained so much attention since RF circuits have high mobility and wide band efficiency, while CMOS technology has the advantage of low cost and better capability of integration. At the same time, IC circuits never stopped scaling down for the recent many decades. Reliability issues with RF circuits have become more and more severe with device scaling down: reliability effects such as gate oxide break down, hot carrier injection, negative bias temperature instability, have been amplified as the device size shrinks. Process variability issues also become more predominant as the feature size decreases. With these insights provided, reliability and variability evaluations on typical RF circuits and possible compensation techniques are highly desirable. In this work, a class E power amplifier is designed and laid out using TSMC 0.18 [micrometer] RF technology and the chip was fabricated. Oxide stress and hot electron tests were carried out at elevated supply voltage, fresh measurement results were compared with different stress conditions after 10 hours. Test results matched very well with mixed mode circuit simulations, proved that hot carrier effects degrades PA performances like output power, power efficiency, etc. Self- heating effects were examined on a class AB power amplifier since PA has high power operations. Device temperature simulation was done both in DC and mixed mode level. Different gate biasing techniques were analyzed and their abilities to compensate output power were compared. A simple gate biasing circuit turned out to be efficient to compensate self-heating effects under different localized heating situations. Process variation was studied on a classic Colpitts oscillator using Monte-Carlo simulation. Phase noise was examined since it is a key parameter in oscillator. Phase noise was modeled using analytical equations and supported by good match between MATLAB results and ADS simulation. An adaptive body biasing circuit was proposed to eliminate process variation. Results from probability density function simulation demonstrated its capability to relieve process variation on phase noise. Standard deviation of phase noise with adaptive body bias is much less than the one without compensation. Finally, a robust, adaptive design technique using PLL as on-chip sensor to reduce Process, Voltage, Temperature (P.V.T.) variations and other aging effects on RF PA was evaluated. The frequency and phase of ring oscillator need to be adjusted to follow the frequency and phase of input in PLL no matter how the working condition varies. As a result, the control signal of ring oscillator has to fluctuate according to the working condition, reflecting the P.V.T changes. RF circuits suffer from similar P.V.T. variations. The control signal of PLL is introduced to RF circuits and converted to the adaptive tuning voltage for substrate bias. Simulation results illustrate that the PA output power under different variations is more flat than the one with no compensation. Analytical equations show good support to what has been observed.

This book discusses a number of challenges faced by designers of wireless receivers, given complications caused by the shrinking of electronic and mobile devices circuitry into ever-smaller sizes and the resulting complications on the manufacturability, production yield, and the end price of the products. The authors describe the impact of process technology on the performance of the end product and equip RF designers with countermeasures to cope with such problems. The mechanisms by which these problems arise are analyzed in detail and novel solutions are provided, including design guidelines for receivers with robustness to process variations and details of circuit blocks that obtain the required performance level. Describes RF receiver frontends and their building blocks from a system- and circuit-level perspective; Provides system-level analysis of a generic RF receiver frontend with robustness to process variations; Includes details of CMOS circuit design at 60GHz and reconfigurable circuits at 60GHz; Covers millimeter-wave circuit design with robustness to process variations.