Gate-Oxide Reliability on CMOS Analog Amplifiers in a 130-nm Low-Voltage CMOS Processes

Abstract

The effect of gate-oxide reliability in MOSFET on common-source amplifiers is investigated with the non-stacked and stacked structures in a 130-nm low-voltage CMOS process. The supply voltage of 2.5 V is applied on the amplifiers to accelerate and observe the impact of gate-oxide reliability on circuit performances including small-signal gain, unity-gain frequency, and output DC voltage level under DC stress and AC stress with DC offset, respectively. The small-signal parameters of amplifier with non-stacked structure strongly degrade under such overstress conditions. The gate-oxide reliability in analog circuit can be improved by stacked structure for small-signal input and output applications