The design and optimization of electronic systems often requires appraisal an of the electrical noise generated by active devices, and, at a technological level, the ability to properly design active elements in order to minimize, when possible, their noise. Examples of critical applications are, of course, receiver front-ends in RF and optoelectronic transmission systems, but also front-end stages in sensors and, in a completely different context, nonlinear circuits such as oscillators, mixers, and frequency multipliers. The rapid de velopment of silicon RF applications has recently fostered the interest toward low-noise silicon devices for the lower microwave band, such as low-noise MOS transistors; at the same time, the RF and microwave ranges are be coming increasingly important in fast optical communication systems. Thus, high-frequency noise modeling and simulation of both silicon and compound semiconductor based bipolar and field-effect transistors can be considered as an important and timely topic. This does not exclude, of course, low frequency noise, which is relevant also in the RF and microwave ranges when ever it is up-converted within a nonlinear system, either autonomous (as an oscillator) or non-autonomous (as a mixer or frequency multiplier). The aim of the present book is to provide a thorough introduction to the physics-based numerical modeling of semiconductor devices operating both in small-signal and in large-signal conditions. In the latter instance, only the non-autonomous case was considered, and thus the present treatment does not directly extend to oscillators.

Related to further miniaturization of semiconductor devices the problem of noise in them becomes more and more important This book is the first one dealing with this subject in a complex way

Klappentext
The book presents a comprehensive treatment of the numerical simulation of semiconductor devices. After an overview of the basic physics of fluctuations in semiconductors, noise modelling techniques are introduced for the small-signal case. In particular, a detailed treatment is devoted to Green's function approaches such as the Impedance Field Method. Then, the numerical implementation of such approaches within the framework of multi-dimensional numerical device models is discussed in detail with reference to the customary Finite-Boxes discretization scheme. Finally, the topic of large-signal noise simulation is addressed within the framework of the Harmonic Balance approach, and implementation details are given for the non-autonomous case. The application fields covered range from low-noise, small-signal amplifiers to nonlinear circuits such as RF and microwave frequency multipliers and mixers.

Inhalt

1. Noise in Semiconductor Devices.- 2. Noise Analysis Techniques.- 3. Physics-Based Small-Signal Noise Simulation.- 4. Results and Case Studies.- 5. Noise in Large-Signal Operation.- A. Appendix: Review of Probability Theory and Random Processes.- A.1 Fundamentals of Probability Theory.- A.2 Random Processes.- A.3 Correlation Spectra and Generalized Harmonic Analysis of Stochastic Processes.- A.4 Linear Transformations of Stochastic Processes.- A.5 Cyclostationary Stochastic Processes.- A.6 A Glimpse of Markov Stochastic Processes.- References.