Design of low power common-gate low noise amplifier for 2.4 GHz wireless sensor network applications

Abstract

This paper presents a differential low power low noise amplifier designed for the wireless sensor network (WSN) in a TSMC 0.18 μm RF CMOS process. A two-stage cross-coupling cascaded common-gate (CG) topology has been designed as the amplifier. The first stage is a capacitive cross-coupling topology. It can reduce the power and noise simultaneously. The second stage is a positive feedback cross-coupling topology, used to set up a negative resistance to enhance the equivalent Q factor of the inductor at the load to improve the gain of the LNA. A differential inductor has been designed as the load to achieve reasonable gain. This inductor has been simulated by the means of momentum electromagnetic simulation in ADS. A “double-π" circuit model has been built as the inductor model by iteration in ADS. The inductor has been fabricated separately to verify the model. The LNA has been fabricated and measured. The LNA works well centered at 2.44 GHz. The measured gain S21 is variable with high gain at 16.8 dB and low gain at 1 dB. The NF (noise figure) at high gain mode is 3.6 dB, the input referenced 1 dB compression point (IP1dB) is about −8 dBm and the IIP3 is 2 dBm at low gain mode. The LNA consumes about 1.2 mA current from 1.8 V power supply.