Silicon on insulator MESFETs for RF amplifiers

CMOS compatible, high voltage SOI MESFETs have been fabricated using a standard 3.3 V CMOS process without any changes to the process flow. A 0.6 μm gate length device operates with a cut-off frequency of 7.3 GHz and a maximum oscillation frequency of 21 GHz. There is no degradation in device performance up to its breakdown voltage, which greatly exceeds that of CMOS devices on the same process. Other figures-of-merit of relevance to RF front-end design are presented, including the maximum stable gain and noise figure. An accurate representation of the device in SPICE has been developed using the commercially available TOM3 model. Using the SOI MESFET model, a source degenerated low noise RF amplifier targeting operation near 1 GHz has been designed. The amplifier was fabricated on a PCB board and operates at 940 MHz with a minimum NF of 3.8 dB and RF gain of 9.9 dB while only consuming 5mW of DC power.