SOI MESFETs for Ultra-Low Power Electronic Circuits

Simulations of high performance silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MESFETs show that they can be used for ultra-low power (ULP) radio frequency electronics with power added efficiencies (PAE) that are 10 times higher than existing solutions. The high PAE comes from the enhanced voltage swing that the MESFETs can tolerate (5-50V) compared to current VLSI CMOS technologies (1-5V). The SOI MESFETs can be fabricated economically using existing SOI CMOS foundries with no changes to the CMOS process flow. This means the SOI MESFETs can be integrated with state-of-the-art CMOS for ULP mixed signal circuit applications, something that is impossible with GaAs based devices. We propose to design an SOI MESFET based Class E amplifier for ULP communications applications in the Industrial-Scientific-Medical band of frequencies. The MESFET based designs will be compared to equivalent CMOS circuits to quantify the anticipated improvement in the PAE of the MESFET circuits. A hardware demonstrator of the Class E amplifier will be designed and tested using existing SOI MESFETs from a previous SBIR contract. Other examples of ULP circuits in which inductive loads lead to device voltages that would cause failure in traditional CMOS will be explored in any Phase II activity.