Design of E- and W-Band Low-Noise Amplifiers in 22-nm CMOS FD-SOI

Abstract

This article presents E- and W-band low-noise amplifiers (LNA) in GlobalFoundries 22-nm CMOS fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI). Both amplifiers employ a three-stage cascode design with gain-boosting transformer loads. Design procedures are presented for E- and W-band LNAs for narrowband and wideband applications. The E-band LNA focuses on a high-gain, low-power implementation, and results in a gain and noise figure (NF) of 20 and 4.6 dB at 77 GHz with a 3-dB bandwidth of 12 GHz, and an input P1dB of −27.4 dBm, for a power consumption of 9 mW. The W-band LNA focuses on wideband applications and results in a peak gain of 18.2 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 31 GHz, for a power consumption of 16 mW. The LNAs have a high figure-of-merit (FoM) and show very low-power operation in the 70–100 GHz range. Application areas are in phased arrays for 5G with hundreds or thousands of elements, automotive radars at 77 GHz, and sensors at 94 GHz.