An Analytical Model for Hot Carrier Induced Long-Term Degradation in Power Amplifiers

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems Vol. 39; no. 10; pp. 2000 - 2005
• Main Authors: Eslahi, Hossein, Albahrani, Sayed Ali, Mahajan, Dhawal, Khandelwal, Sourabh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aging; Carrier injection; Computer simulation; conduction angle; Degradation; hot-carrier injection (HCI); Integrated circuit modeling; Integrated circuit reliability; Mathematical model; Mathematical models; power amplifier (PA); Power amplifiers; Reliability analysis; reliability model; Stress
• ISSN: 0278-0070; 1937-4151
• DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2019.2952554

Degradation of power amplifier (PA), being a main part of a transceiver chain, affects the overall performance of a transceiver. This article reports, for the first time, an analytical reliability model of the hot-carrier injection (HCI) induced degradation in silicon-based PAs. HCI causes substrate current which is used to develop the proposed model. This model fits very well the simulation results of RelXpert, which is a well-established reliability simulation tool. This model predicts circuit degradation as a function of conduction angle and is valid for the different classes of PAs. With this model, a new approach for "reliability aware design" for PA design is developed and a tradeoff between PA performance and reliability is introduced.