A 0.1–2.75 GHz high-linear low-noise transconductance amplifier for high-performance multi-standard wireless applications

Abstract

The frequency bands below 3 GHz are occupied by various wireless applications. The overcrowding of many applications in these bands is the primary source of distortion in the wireless system. To combat distortion in the system, the radio frequency (RF) blocks must satisfy the linearity requirements of the application. Hence, in this paper, a high linear wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) stage is proposed for RF front-end. The LNA uses the combination of common-gate (CG) and common-source (CS) stages for cancelling the noise and distortion of the input matching CG stage. The CS stage exploits complementary derivative superposition (CDS) for linearity improvement, and cross-coupled local feedback network is employed for noise cancellation at the output. The LNA stage is designed using UMC 180 nm CMOS process technology and post-layout characterizations are carried out using Cadence SpectreRF circuit simulator. Also, the process corner, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variation analysis and Monte-Carlo simulations for mismatch analysis are carried out to verify the reliability of the LNA. The designed LNA has an input referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of 8.85 dBm. The proposed LNA has a maximum gain of 23.96 dB and minimum noise figure (NF) of 1.4 dB with a total current consumption of 3.1 mA from a 1.8 V supply.