Survey on parameter optimization of mobile communication band low noise amplifier design

Abstract

A comparative study on recent works on low noise amplifiers (LNAs) designed to be operated at mobile communication band is performed in this article. Here, specifications of different generations of mobile communication are listed, which are considered to classify recent works on LNAs. Even though gain and noise figure (NF) are the primary parameters of LNA; other parameters like power, linearity, bandwidth, and area also get importance. Due to this, optimization techniques handpicked for all those parameters are discussed. The inverse relation between gain and NF is exploited to achieve low noise and high gain together. While increasing the gain, power consumption is increased by drain current. Each LNA is found as good in terms of gain and other parameters to satisfy the requirements. The figure of merit is opted to find the performance of each LNA, and the comparison is performed. The best parameters reported in the comparison are 31.53 dB of gain, 0.7 dB of NF, 0.03 mw of power consumption, 18.14 dBm of third-order input intercept point (IIP3), 24 GHz bandwidth and 0.0052 mm2 of area at different frequencies and technology nodes. In this survey, as per the optimized FoM for mobile communication, cross-coupled common gate differential LNA, which was designed to be operated at 0.3 to 2.96 GHz gives better results among CMOS LNAs.