Low-frequency noise has been measured on commercial power MOSFETs. These devices, fabricated with the VDMOS structure, exhibit a 1/f type noise spectrum. The interface state density obtained from noise measurements was compared with that obtained from the subthreshold-slope method. Reasonable agreement was found between the two measurements. The radiation effects on the noise power spectral density were also investigated. The results indicated that the noise can be attributed to the generation of interface traps near the Si-SiO₂ interface. The level of interface traps generated by radiation was bias dependent. The positive gate bias gave rise to the largest interface-trap density.

Graduation date: 1996

First, the concepts of reflection coefficients, s-parameters, Smith chart, noise figure, and available power gain will be introduced. This lays out the foundation for the presentation of techniques on measuring noise figure and gain of high speed bipolar junction transistors. Noise sources in a bipolar junction transistor and an equivalent circuit including these noise sources will be presented. The process of determining the noise parameters of a transistor will also be discussed. A Pascal program and several TEKSPICE scripts are developed to calculate the stability, available power gain, and noise figure circles. Finally, these circles are plotted on a Smith chart to give a clear view of how a transistor will perform due to a change in source impedances.

Low-frequency noise (LFN) is characterized using in-house measurement systems in a variety of SiGe HBT generations. As technology scales to improve the performance and integration level, a large low-frequency noise variation in small geometry SiGe HBTs is first observed in 90 GHz peak fT devices. The fundamental mechanism of this geometry dependent noise variation is thought to be the superposition of individual Lorentzian spectra due to the presence of G/R centers in the device. The observed noise variation is the result of a trap quantization effect, and is thus best described by number fluctuation theory rather than mobility fluctuation theory. This noise variation continues to be observed in 120 GHz and 210 GHz peak fT SiGe HBT BiCMOS technology. Interestingly, the noise variation in the 210 GHz technology generation shows anomalous scaling behavior below about 0.2-0.3um2 emitter geometry, where the noise variation rapidly decreases. Data shows that the collector current noise is no longer masked by the base current noise as it is in other technology generations, and becomes the dominant noise source in these tiny 210 GHz fT SiGe HBTs. The proton response of LFN in SiGe HBTs is also investigated in this thesis. The results show that the relative increase of LFN is minor in transistors with small emitter areas, but significant in transistors with large emitter areas after radiation. A noise degradation model is proposed to explain this observed geometry dependent LFN degradation. A 2-D LFN simulation is applied to SiGe HBTs for the first time in order to shed light on the physical mechanisms responsible for LFN. A spatial distribution of base current noise and collector current noise reveals the relevant importance of the physical locations of noise sources. The impact of LFN in SiGe HBTs on circuits is also examined. The impact of LFN variation on phase noise is demonstrated, showing VCOs with small geometry devices have relatively large phase noise variation across samples.

Thesis (M. S.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Mark H. Weatherspoon, Florida State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 19, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 70 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis describes the conductivity fluctuations or noise measurements in graphenebased field effect transistors. The main motivation was to study the effect of disorder on the electronic transport in graphene. In chapter 4, we report the noise measurements in graphene field effect (GraFET) transistors with varying layer numbers. We found that the density dependence of noise behaves oppositely for single and multilayer graphene. An analytical model has been proposed to understand the microscopic mechanism of noise in GraFETs, which reveals that noise is intimately connected to the band structure of graphene. Our results outline a simple portable method to separate the single layer devices from multi layered ones. Chapter 5 discusses the noise measurements in two systems with a bandgap: biased bilayer graphene and graphene nanoribbon. We show that noise is sensitive to the presence of a bandgap and becomes minimum when the bandgap is zero. At low temperature, mesoscopic graphene devices exhibit universal conductance fluctuations (UCF) arising due to quantum interference effect. In chapter 6, we have studied UCF in single layer graphene and show that it can be sensitive to the presence of various physical symmetries. We report that time reversal symmetry exists in graphene at low temperature and, for the first time, we observed enhanced UCF at lower carrier density where the scattering is dominated by the long-range Coulomb scattering. Chapter 7 presents the transport and noise measurements in single layer graphene in the quantum Hall regime. At ultra-low temperature several broken symmetry states appear in the lowest Landau level, which originate possibly due to strong electron-electron interactions. Our preliminary noise measurements in the quantum Hall regime reveal that the noise is sensitive to the bulk to edge transport and can be a powerful tool to investigate these new quantum states.