Analysis and Design of Inductorless Wideband Low-Noise Amplifier With Noise Cancellation Technique

Abstract

This paper deals with the fabrication of an inductorless wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA). The LNA includes two branches in parallel: a common-source (CS) path and a common-gate (CG) path. The CS path is responsible for providing enough power gain, while the CG path is used to achieve the input impedance matching. To eliminate the noise contribution of the CG path, the noise cancellation technique is applied. Therefore, the overall noise figure (NF) is improved. The phase mismatch between the two paths is also quantitatively analyzed to investigate its effect on gain and NF. The analytical results agree well with the simulation results. The LNA has been fabricated by a commercial 0.18-μm CMOS process. The measurement results show that the LNA has achieved a maximum gain of 14.5 dB with 1.7-GHz 3-dB gain bandwidth and a minimum NF of 3 dB. The tested input 1-dB gain compression point (IP1 dB) is -10.4 dBm at 1 GHz and the input third-order intercept point is 0.25 dBm. With 1.8-V supply, the LNA draws only 6-mA dc current.

Keywords

• Low-noise amplifier
• inductorless
• noise cancellation
• phase mismatch
• noise figure
• CMOS