Long-term degradation effects in power amplifiers: analysis, modelling and remedies

The wireless communication systems seen with an impressive progress over the last decades. To continue this progress and reach better performance, device dimensions should be down-scaled and this downward trend causes several effects which lead to less reliable systems. The reliability problems are more severe in high frequencies which degrades performance. To address this looming challenge this thesis proposed a new concept of "Reliability-Aware Design". This thesis shows that there exist trade-offs between performance and reliability. If reliability is considered from the beginning of the design phase, intelligent sweet-spots can be identified which deliver both reasonable performance and reliability. Among different RF circuits, power amplifier (PA) is more vulnerable to degradation since it must deliver high power to a load. Therefore, we focus our work on PA's. The aim of this thesis is to describe physical and analytical model for PA reliability which clearly shows the trade-offs with performance in the design phase of PAs.