Prediction of energy change due to hot carrier injection in nano-structured CMOS system: Perspective of an envelope detector

• A correlation technique to obtain RF and gain change relationship after HCI effect.
• Prediction of gain change due to HCI on different technology nodes.
• The technique predicts HCI driven gain change under different frequency.
• Forecasting of HCI driven energy change for different frequency operated circuits.

Due to aggressive scaling of CMOS technology, many time-variant issues are catastrophic to MOSFET reliability. Hot carrier injection (HCI) is one of these reliability issues and is a limiting factor for n-MOSFET performance. The HCI aging effect causes shift in drain current and threshold voltage at sub-nanometer technologies. There are many works describing device level HCI prediction, but there is still room for improvement in predicting the gain change behavior due to HCI at circuit level. Therefore, we developed a correlation technique to obtain radio frequency and gain change relationship after the HCI effect is induced in a CMOS circuit. In brief, it is a technique to predict the behavior of HCI driven gain transformation with respect to frequency. Therefore, at a certain frequency the change of gain due to HCI can be observed. To implement this technique, we employed an envelope detector circuit and predicted the gain change due to HCI on several technology nodes. Unlike some of the previous prediction techniques, this technique provides a thorough picture of the HCI driven gain change at various frequencies in CMOS circuit. This technique is scalable, as shown by its application to different technology nodes.

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