CMOS X‐band pole‐converging triple‐cascode LNA with low‐noise and wideband performance

Abstract

Abstract A pole‐converging X‐band low‐noise amplifier (LNA) using 130 nm CMOS technology is proposed. An on‐chip pole‐converging capacitor CPC is added between the gate and drain node of the common‐gate (CG) stage. The capacitor CPC combines with a noise‐reducing inductor L1 to converge poles into the desired band, which results in a pole‐converging effect and wideband performance. The proposed modified broadband simultaneous noise and input‐matching technique is adopted in triple‐cascode configuration to realize good input matching and a low noise figure (NF). Measurement results exhibit a flat maximum power gain of 17.6 dB from 8 to 12 GHz and a reverse isolation over 60 dB within the desired bandwidth along with an NF ranging from 1.5 to 3.6 dB. The LNA core dissipates 17 mW from 2.4 V supply, and the chip size occupies 1.1 × 0.9 mm2 including all pads. The simulated and measured results show good agreement from 8 to 12 GHz.

Keywords

• capacitors
• CMOS integrated circuits
• field effect MIMIC
• inductors
• low noise amplifiers
• millimetre wave amplifiers