A Packaged and ESD-Protected Inductorless 0.1–8 GHz Wideband CMOS LNA

Abstract

In this letter, an inductorless 0.1-8 GHz wideband CMOS differential low noise amplifier (LNA) based on a modified resistive feedback topology is proposed. Without using any passive inductors, the modified resistive feedback technique implemented with a parallel R-C feedback, an active inductor load, and neutralization capacitors achieves high gain, low noise, and good return loss over a wide bandwidth. To ensure the robustness in the system integration, electro-static discharge diodes are added to the radio frequency pads. The LNA was fabricated using a digital 90 nm CMOS technology. It achieves a 3 dB bandwidth of 8 GHz with a 16 dB voltage gain, noise figures from 3.4 dB to 5.8 dB across the whole band, and an input third-order intermodulation product (IIP3) of -9 dBm. The active area of the chip is 0.034 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . The chip was packaged and tested on an FR4 PCB using the chip-on-board approach.