Analyzing the Impact of FinFET Self-Heating on the Performance of RF Power Amplifiers

In FinFET nodes, high transistor power densities in a power amplifier (PA) lead to device self-heating (SH), degrading performance. This study investigates the impact of SH in large PA FinFET arrays. An encoder-decoder network, together with a long short-term memory model, is used for rapid and accurate thermal analysis. This fast analyzer helps better explore design optimizations than conventional computationally-expensive thermal solvers. The work explores methods for mitigating thermal effects in PAs by inserting dummy transistors within the array of active FinFET devices, and shows the impact of duty cycle and frequency on PA performance.