A 30–50-GHz Ultralow-Power Low-Noise Amplifier With Second-Stage Current-Reuse for Radio Astronomical Receivers in 90-nm CMOS Process

Abstract

A Q-band (30–50 GHz) ultralow-power low-noise amplifier (LNA) for radio astronomical receivers in 90-nm CMOS technology is presented in this letter. A common source stage with source degeneration is utilized for simultaneous noise and impedance matching. To achieve high gain and low power consumption, the current-reused technique is adopted in this work. According to measurement, the proposed Q-band LNA achieves a 20.5-dB small signal gain with 26-GHz 3-dB bandwidth (25.5–51.5 GHz) and the lowest in-band noise figure (NF) of 4.2-dB noise. The LNA consumes only 10.1 mW with a compact chip area of 0.6 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math> </inline-formula> 1 mm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$</tex-math> </inline-formula> . Although this LNA is fabricated in 90-nm CMOS process, it achieves the state-of-the-art figure of merit (FOM) compared to other advanced CMOS processes.