High Sensitivity Temperature Measurements to Track and Compensate Aging Effects on CMOS Amplifiers

This article presents a method to monitor and compensate gain degradation produced by aging in linear CMOS amplifiers. The proposed procedure relies on a stand-alone temperature sensor circuit. DC measurements at the output of the temperature sensor allow to monitor high-frequency gain, and to select an adaptive biasing to keep a constant gain along the circuit lifetime. The approach is validated experimentally on a high-frequency Power Amplifier, which was subjected to an accelerated aging degradation. Experimental results demonstrate the capability to keep the amplifier gain within 0.3 dB from its fresh value, even after important device aging degradation.