Inter-laboratory comparison of CMOS distortion measurements

Abstract

We describe a measurement comparison of distortion in a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor low-noise device operating under weakly nonlinear conditions. Issues that commonly arise in performing and interpreting nonlinear measurements are discussed, such as power and wave-based representations and the effects of terminating impedance on intermodulation distortion. We demonstrate that the increased confidence provided by a measurement comparison can help to diagnose issues with a device model that was initially derived from DC I/V curves and their derivatives and then compared to RF measurement.