Circuit Design And Reliability Of A Cmos Receiver

This dissertation explores CMOS RF design and reliability for portable wireless receivers. The objective behind this research is to achieve an increase in integration level, and gain more understanding for RF reliability. The fields covered include device, circuit and system. What is under investigation is a multi-band multi-mode receiver with GSM, DCS-1800 and CDMA compatibility. To my understanding, GSM and CDMA dual-mode mobile phones are progressively investigated in industries, and few commercial products are available. The receiver adopts direct conversion architecture. Some improved circuit design methods are proposed, for example, for low noise amplifier (LNA). Except for band filters, local oscillators, and analog-digital converters which are usually implemented by COTS SAW filters and ICs, all the remaining blocks such as switch, LNA, mixer, and local oscillator are designed in MOSIS TSMC 0.35[micro]m technology in one chip. Meanwhile, this work discusses related circuit reliability issues, which are gaining more and more attention. Breakdown (BD) and hot carrier (HC) effects are important issues in semiconductor industry. Soft-breakdown (SBD) and HC effects on device and RF performance has been reported. Hard-breakdown (HBD) effects on digital circuits have also been investigated. This work uniquely address HBD effects on the RF device and circuit performance, taking low noise amplifier and power amplifier as targets

Cross-Layer Approaches for an Aging-Aware Design of Nanoscale Microprocessors

Thanks to aggressive scaling of transistor dimensions, computers have revolutionized our life. However, the increasing unreliability of devices fabricated in nanoscale technologies emerged as a major threat for the future success of computers. In particular, accelerated transistor aging is of great importance, as it reduces the lifetime of digital systems. This thesis addresses this challenge by proposing new methods to model, analyze and mitigate aging at microarchitecture-level and above