1.2 V asymmetric-CCC based sub-3 dB NF high IIP3 linearity wideband balun-LNA

Abstract

A CG-CS wideband balun-LNA using asymmetric capacitive cross-coupling (A-CCC) and an auxiliary current reuse amplifier (ACRA) is reported in the literature. It achieves low noise figure (NF) and high gain at the cost of linearity. To improve the linearity, inductive loads are proposed. However, this is at the cost of increase in chip area. To overcome this problem, a balun-LNA using modified complementary derivative superposition and asymmetric CCC-DS techniques for the ACRA and A-CCC block respectively is proposed in this paper. It dispenses with the inductive loads. The balun-LNAs with and without the proposed linearization are implemented in UMC 180 nm CMOS technology with a supply of 1.2 V and are studied through post-layout simulations. It is found that the proposed LNA has +7.96 dBm increase in average IIP3 compared to the LNA without the proposed linearization. It achieves an average IIP3 of +5.49 dBm with a peak gain of 24.2 dB and minimum NF of 2.18 dB over the bandwidth of 1–3 GHz. The proposed LNA requires an area of 0.3 mm2 and a power of 6.95 mW.