Mechanism of Energy-Injection Damage of Silicon Bipolar Low-Noise Amplifiers
硅基双极低噪声放大器的能量注入损伤与机理

Experiments of the energy injection into silicon bipolar low-noise amplifiers (LNA) are conducted by introducing pulse-modulated 150MHz radio frequency (RF) signal at LNAs inputs.The results show that the noise figure and the gain characteristic of silicon LNAs are sensitive to the injection energy.The metallization damage between the base and the emitter is correlated with the energy injection from the sample dissection analysis.The noise figure increases due to increased metal-semiconductor contact resistance of the base.The gain of the LNAs also increases with injection energy following the positive drift damage model of hFE for the silicon bipolar devices.Therefore,the traditional way to evaluate the damage effect of devices and circuits simply by the change of the gain is not comprehensive due to the complexity of the energy injection induced damage.