Hot carrier effects on the RF performance degradation of nanoscale LNA SOI nFETs

The Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) effects on the DC and small signal RF parameters of nanoscale Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) nMOSFETs developed for high performance low noise amplifier (LNA) circuits are investigated. In recent years there has been an increased interest in the RF reliability [1-2] but very few studies have focused on LNA devices [3]. This is the first study done on thin-film SOI nFETs scaled down to 35 nm where stress experiments specifically designed to address the LNA operational bias conditions and RF figures-of-merits (FoMs) are carried out. The obtained results provide a deeper understanding of the correlation of the shift in the small signal parameters to the DC parameters and thus lay the foundation for a reliability-aware RF LNA design.