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

摘要

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.