Statistical Analysis of Process Variations in RF/mm-Wave Circuits With On-The-Fly Passive Macro-Modeling

Abstract

Process variations in passive components, e.g., inductors, transformers, baluns, and transmission lines, are increasingly degrading the performance and production yield in RF/mm-wave circuits with technology scaling. Traditional statistical analysis methods are not suitable for RF/mm-wave circuits as time-consuming EM simulation needs to be performed many times. In this paper, a statistical analysis framework is proposed for RF/mm-wave circuits considering both active and passive components. Active components are modeled in the standard way and passive components are described with a modified response surface model using a projection-based technique, which reduces the required number of EM simulation to <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O</i> ( <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> ) . During the statistical analysis, the S-parameter of passive components is translated into a noise companion state-space model by passive macro-modeling to support frequency-domain, time-domain, and noise analysis. The proposed method has been justified and applied with some examples designed for a realistic 60-GHz CMOS receiver front-end. The results show that active and passive components have comparable and significant contribution to the variation of circuit performance.