Summary: | As the technology scales down, besides the CAD tools and design guidelines, understanding circuit performance degradation as a consequence of transistor degradation becomes essential for designers. Due to several adverse environmental conditions, the study of performance degradation in the power amplifier (PA) is very demanding research. In this paper, an RF PA is experimentally studied to observe various characteristic degradations in a broad range of operating temperature and humidity conditions. Based on a few key measurement points, a measurement-based modeling method is proposed to help designers make intelligent decisions to minimize the performance degradation effects. This method uses four two-dimensional interpolation models, and the results show that the prediction results of the four planar interpolation models are in good agreement with the measurement results. The results presented in this article help select design models for the RF power amplifier that can analyze the performance degradation of the transistor parameters in advance. Cubic and spline interpolation has the highest model accuracy among the four two-dimensional models, while the nearest interpolation offers the shortest training time.
|