A Novel Sub-mW Low-Power gm-boost CMOS Common Gate LNA for Wireless Receiver

Abstract

A new common-gate (CG) low-noise amplifier (LNA) with a passive gm-boost network (PGBN) is proposed in this work. With a much bigger gm-boost amplification coefficient introduced by the PGBN, the fixed noise reduction coefficient (with the max value to be 1) for the traditional capacitor-cross-coupled CG LNA is broken. As a result, the noise figure (NF) can be further reduced. Moreover, the power consumption can also be greatly reduced simultaneously. The proposed LNA is of great interest for low-power fully integrated wireless communication receiver with relative high NF requirement, which is designed in a TSMC 0.18 μm process. The experimental simulation results show the proposed LNA achieves 7.6 dB power gain, a NF of 1.3 dB, good input/output matching with the S11 and S22 both less than −40 dB, and the IIP3 is measured to be −11.8 dB. The LNA also demonstrate an ultra-low power consumption of 0.67 mW with a 1.8 V power supply, which is quite suitable for “Green” power consumption applications.