A 8–40 GHz, 8 mW LNA with 27 dB peak gain and 5.2 dB NF for multiband applications

Abstract

An extremely-wideband, 8-40 GHz, low power Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) is presented in this paper. The LNA utilizes a novel combination of design techniques, namely resistive feedback, emitter degeneration, and shunt-peaked split-inductor to provide wideband input and noise matching. Furthermore, the LNA is designed as 3-stage amplifier to provide better gain control through stagger-tuning method, to meet gain specification across the entire band. The proposed LNA was implemented in 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS process with 150 GHz f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</sub> . The design achieves a peak gain of 27 dB with minimum Noise Figure (NF) of 5.2 dB. The gain of the LNA is greater than 15.2 dB and NF is less than 7.2 dB from 8-40 GHz. The LNA consumes only 6.7 mA from a 1.2 V supply and occupies an area of only 0.26 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . Using the proposed architecture, this work demonstrates LNA with extremely wide bandwidth and 3.7X improvement in FoM over comparable state-of-the-art designs.