Inductor-less PVT robust gain switching balun LNA for multistandard applications

Abstract

ABSTRACTAn inductor-less single to differential low-noise amplifier (LNA) is proposed for multistandard applications in the frequency band of 0.2–2 GHz. The proposed LNA incorporates noise cancellation and voltage shunt feedback configuration to achieve minimum noise characteristics and low power consumption. In addition to noise cancellation, trans-conductance of common-source stage is scaled to improve the noise performance. In this way, noise figure (NF) of LNA below 3 dB is achieved. An additional capacitor Cc is used to correct the gain and phase imbalance at the output. The gain switching has been enabled with a step size of 4 dB for high linearity and power efficiency. The bias point of all transistors is chosen such that the variation in gm is not more than 10%. The proposed LNA is implemented in UMC 0.18-μm RF CMOS technology. The core area is 182 μm × 181 μm. Moreover, the LNA has better ratio of relevant performance to area. The proposed balun LNA is validated by rigorous Monte Carlo simulation. The 3σ deviation of gain and NF is less than 5%. Finally, the proposed LNA is robust to unavoidable PVT variations.