The Impact of Gate-Oxide Breakdown on Common-Source Amplifiers

semico_ljj

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 54, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2007

The Impact of Gate-Oxide Breakdown on
Common-Source Amplifiers With Diode-Connected
Active Load in Low-Voltage CMOS Processes

Jung-Sheng Chen, Student Member, IEEE, and Ming-Dou Ker, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract

The influence of gate-oxide reliability on common–
source amplifiers with diode-connected active load is investigated
with the nonstacked and stacked structures under analog application
in a 130-nm low-voltage CMOS process. The test conditions
of this work include the dc stress, ac stress with dc offset,
and large-signal transition stress under different frequencies and
signals. After overstresses, the small-signal parameters, such as
small-signal gain, unity-gain frequency, phase margin, and output
dc voltage levels, are measured to verify the impact of gate-oxide
reliability on circuit performances of the common-source amplifiers
with diode-connected active load. The small-signal parameters
of the common-source amplifier with the nonstacked
diode-connected active-load structure are strongly degraded than
that with the stacked diode-connected active-load structure due
to a gate-oxide breakdown under analog and digital applications.
The common-source amplifiers with diode-connected active load
are not functionally operational under digital application due to
the gate-oxide breakdown. The impact of soft and hard gate-oxide
breakdowns on the common-source amplifiers with nonstacked
and stacked diode-connected active-load structures has been analyzed
and discussed. The hard breakdown has more serious
impact on the common-source amplifiers with diode-connected
active load.


Index Terms

Analog integrated circuit, common-source amplifier,
dielectric breakdown, gate-oxide reliability, hard breakdown,
soft breakdown.

semico_ljj

CONCLUSION
The impact of gate-oxide reliability on the CMOS commonsource
amplifiers with the nonstacked and stacked diodeconnected
active-load structures has been investigated and
analyzed under the dc stress, the ac stress with dc offset, and
the large-signal transition stress. The small-signal parameters
of the common-source amplifier with the nonstacked diodeconnected
active-load structure are seriously degraded than
that with the stacked diode-connected active-load structure by
gate-oxide breakdown under dc, ac, and large-signal transition
stresses. The stacked structure can be used to improve the
reliability of analog circuit in nanoscale CMOS process. The
impact of soft breakdown, hard breakdown, and breakdown
location on the circuit performances of the common-source
amplifiers with the nonstacked and stacked diode-connected
active-load structures has been investigated and analyzed. The
hard gate-oxide breakdown has more serious impact on the
performances of the common-source amplifier with the diodeconnected
active load.

luoyih

楼主辛苦了。

virgil-huang

好资料…………