Hot carrier and soft breakdown effects on LNA performance for ultra wideband communications

This paper systematically investigates the hot carrier (HC) and soft breakdown (SBD) effects on CMOS low noise amplifier (LNA) for the ultra wide-band (UWB) of 3.1 to 7 GHz. After the MOSFET device RF parameter degradations due to HC and SBD effects are experimentally extracted, the HC and SBD induced performance degradations of the LNA for UWB are evaluated for 0.16 μm CMOS technology, including s-parameters, noise figure, and stability factor. This work can help RF designers to design more reliable LNA circuits for upcoming UWB applications.