A new evaluation technique of hot carrier degradation is proposed and applied to practical evaluation of p-channel polycrystalline silicon thin film transistors (TFT). The proposed technique introduces emission microscopy which is particularly effective for evaluating TFT devices. We have developed an automatic measurement system in which measurement of the electrical characteristics and monitoring the photo emission are done simultaneously. Using this system, we have identified the dominant mechanism of hot carrier degradation in TFTs, and evaluated the effect of plasma hydrogenation on hot carrier degradation.

This paper describes a sub 1-V low noise amplifier (LNA) fabricated using a 0.35 µm SOI (silicon on insulator) CMOS process. The SOI devices have high speed performance even at low operating voltage (below 1 V) because of their smaller parasitic capacitance at source and drain than those of bulk MOSs. A body of a MOSFET can be controlled by using a field shield (FS) plate. The transistor body of the LNA is connected to its gate. The threshold voltage of the transistor becomes lower due to the body-biased effect so that a large drain current keeps the gain high, and active-body control improves the 1-dB gain compression point. A gain of 7.0 dB and a Noise Figure (NF) of 3.6 dB are obtained at 1.0 V and 1.9 GHz. The output power at the 1-dB gain compression point is +1.5 dBm. The gain and the output power at the 1-dB gain compression point are higher by 1.2 dB and 2.9 dB respectively than those of a conventionally body-fixed LNA. A 5.5 dB gain is also obtained at the supply voltage of 0.5 V.

This paper discusses the features of SOI/CMOS circuits in comparison with bulk/CMOS circuits. We have to design circuits with small fan outs and short wires to take advantage of high-speed and low-power SOI/CMOS devices to their fullest. We can take advantage of the SOI/CMOS structure if the ratio of the source/drain capacitances to the gate capacitances is much greater in the load capacitance. Thus, we propose a new flip-flop circuit with a smaller gate capacitance. The flip-flop circuit operates 30% faster than the previous circuit at 2.0 V. We also propose a buffer circuit having less delay disparity between the complementary output signals. The buffer circuit has the delay disparity of 18 ps at 0.2 pF and 2.0 V. We fabricated an 8-bit frequency divider and a 4-bit demultiplexer using the proposed circuits and 0.35 µm SOI/CMOS process. The 8-bit frequency divider and the 4-bit demultiplexer operate at 2.8 GHz and 1.6 GHz, respectively, at 2.0 V.

This paper describes a 0.35µm SOI-CMOS gate array using partially-depleted transistors. The gate array adopts the field-shield isolation technique with body-tied structures to suppress floating-body problems such as: (1) kink characteristics in drain currents, (2) low break-down voltage, and (3) frequency-dependent delay time. By optimizing the basic-cell layout and power-line wiring, the SOI-CMOS gate array also allows the use of the cell libraries and the design methodologies compatible with bulk-CMOS gate arrays. An ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) physical-layer processing LSI was fabricated using a 0.35µm SOI-CMOS gate array with 560k raw gates. The LSI operated at 156 Mbps at 2.0 V, while consuming 71% less power than using a typical 0.35µm 3.3 V bulk-CMOS gate array.