Integrated HSPICE–MATLAB Framework for Thermal-Aware Simulation and Performance Analysis of RF Circuits

Abstract

Under the present high speed wireless communication development trend, the RF circuits are continually submitted to thermal stress that has greatly impacted their reliability and performance. Standard methods to circuit simulation may ignore the fluctuation of the temperature in such crucial parameters including the gain, the noise figure (NF), and power consumptions. The current paper is an attempt to present an integrated co-simulation environment that consists of HSPICE and MATLAB, to achieve a thermal-aware RF circuit modeling and performance assessment. The aim will be to build an active automated simulation cycle that will present the temperature dependant phenomena of semiconducting devices under practical operating conditions. To perform electrical simulation, the framework uses HSPICE and temperature profiling, parametric control, as well as post-processing, it adopts MATLAB. The procedure is illustrated using a case study of 2.4 GHz CMOS-based Low Noise Amplifier (LNA). With a temperature ranging between 25 0 and 125 0, the simulation outcomes show that up to 18 per cent gain degradation and 12 percent increase in noise figure occur because of the temperature effect on the RF circuit. The given framework represents a scalable method proposed to analyze thermal reliability at an early stage in next-generation RF systems.