ABSTRACT
The development and manufacture of low voltage/low power radio frequency (RF) and microwave electronics has been the subject of intense focus over the past few decades. The development of active circuits that consume lower power at lower voltage levels is consistent with the general trends of semiconductor scaling. From the simple relationship
E = V d
(27.1)
where E is the electric field, V is the voltage, and d is the separation distance, it can be seen that smaller devices (reduced d) require less voltage to achieve the same electric field levels. Since to first order it is electric field in a material that dominates electron transport properties, electric field levels must be preserved when devices are scaled. Therefore, for each reduction in critical dimension (gate length or base width) reductions in operating voltage have been realized.
