Low‐noise and high‐gain wideband LNA with g m ‐boosting technique

Abstract

A broadband low-noise amplifier (LNA) is proposed. The active gm -boosting technique is utilised to reduce the common-gate (CG) LNA noise figure and improve gain. An implemented prototype using 0.13 μm CMOS technology is evaluated using on-wafer probing. S 11 and S 22 are below − 10 dB across 0.1–5 GHz. Measurements show a power gain of 18.3 dB with a − 3 dB bandwidth from 100 MHz to 2.1 GHz and an IIP3 of − 7 dBm at 2 GHz. The measured noise figure is better than 2.5 dB below 2.1 GHz, better than 4.5 dB below 5 GHz and at 500 MHz it obtains its minimum value 1.8 dB. The LNA consumes 14 mW from 1.5 V supply and occupies an area of 0.04 mm2.