A 21-to-41-GHz High-Gain Low Noise Amplifier With Triple-Coupled Technique for Multiband Wireless Applications

Abstract

This brief presents a wideband millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) low noise amplifier (LNA) with a triple-coupled technique for multiband wireless applications. To enlarge the gain and reduce the supply voltage, a modified cascode topology exploiting a triple-coupled transformer is developed. Thanks to the transformer, the transconductance of the common-gate (CG) transistor of the cascode topology is also effectively boosted, and hence the gain is further increased. Furthermore, high-order networks, which are realized by combinations of π- and T/L-type structures or transformers, are employed to implement the input, inter-stage, and output impedance matchings. They significantly broaden the bandwidth of the circuit. The LNA is demonstrated using a commercial 65-nm CMOS process. The measurement results show that the circuit achieves a maximum gain of 28.5 dB and a 3-dB gain bandwidth of 20 GHz with 32-mW dc power consumption ( P <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dc</sub> ). The measured noise figure (NF) and input 1-dB gain compression point ( IP <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1dB</sub> ) are 2.7~3.2 dB and -24.6~-20.4 dBm, respectively, over the entire operating bandwidth.