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.