Investigation of the Specification Degradation Mechanism of CMOS Power Amplifier under Thermal Shock Test

Abstract

To investigate the critical specifications of a power amplifier (PA) under rapidly changing temperature conditions, we fabricated and tested a 0.3–1.1 GHz complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) PA under thermal shock tests. The results show that high- and low-temperature shocks can accelerate the degradation of critical specifications of PAs and that the critical specifications of PAs degrade with the increasing number of shocks. The main reason for the degradation of critical specifications of PAs with increasing thermal shock tests is the mismatch of thermal expansion coefficients of printed circuit boards (PCB) with FR-4 as a substrate. The results of this paper can provide a reference for the development of temperature-robust PAs design guidelines for the implementation of temperature-robust PAs using low-cost silicon technology.

Investigation on Temperature Behavior for a GaAs E-pHEMT MMIC LNA

“…This means that if its performance degrades to an uncertain level due to the temperature, an irreversible failure for MMIC LNAs with admirable indexes will be caused [ 8 ]. According to previous papers, investigation on temperature behavior is still a hot issue [ 9 , 10 ]. However, the common temperature ranges, depending on the extreme temperature, are −40–120 °C, −25–125 °C, 10–90 °C, 20–120 °C or 25–125 °C and so on [ 8 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ].…”

“…Notably, it is not appropriate to use similar methods to determine the temperature of investigation under alpine conditions. Although there are other ways to study circuit performance [ 9 , 20 ], the research on temperature behavior under certain conditions is absent. Indeed, it is completely necessary to conduct a survey at the actual temperature range.…”