Do people prefer RF transistors for RF IC circuits?

Tip / Sign in to post questions, reply, level up, and achieve exciting badges. Know more

cross mob
DeepMohinman
Level 1
Level 1
First question asked Welcome!

In many of the foundry libraries there are options such as “nmos_rf” in addition to standard “nmos” and their layouts are pre-layed out with a guard ring around them.

This makes them a very bad choice when some kind of matching is required in Gilbert mixer or LC VCO as the transistor pairs cannot be interdigitized. Also I will eventually know every parasitic after I layout my circuit and run a parasitic extraction simulation.

So, my question is do you use rf_transistors in a given process and where is the advantage?

0 Likes
1 Solution
Mathias
Employee
Employee
5 solutions authored 10 replies posted 10 sign-ins

Hi @DeepMohinman,

in many of our products we use different silicon process technologies, from Bi-Polar, CMOS, BICMOS etc.  In all of the process technologies we have RF_transistors defined in the library which have a significant difference to a standard transistor cell.  As this is a quite large range of possible devices, I will not go further into the details of silicon implementations. 

Sure thing is, for all Products we use in RF, we have specific models to fit to the requirements of RF in the device.

 

best regards

Mathias 

View solution in original post

0 Likes
2 Replies
George_T
Moderator
Moderator
Moderator
50 likes received First question asked 250 replies posted

Hi @DeepMohinman,

Could you please elaborate your question for better understanding and mention which specific product are you referring to?

Thanks and regards

George

0 Likes
Mathias
Employee
Employee
5 solutions authored 10 replies posted 10 sign-ins

Hi @DeepMohinman,

in many of our products we use different silicon process technologies, from Bi-Polar, CMOS, BICMOS etc.  In all of the process technologies we have RF_transistors defined in the library which have a significant difference to a standard transistor cell.  As this is a quite large range of possible devices, I will not go further into the details of silicon implementations. 

Sure thing is, for all Products we use in RF, we have specific models to fit to the requirements of RF in the device.

 

best regards

Mathias 

0 Likes