Ultra Wide Band Low Noise Amplifier for Communication Receivers in 0.18 um CMOS technology

Maryam Vafadar

This paper presents an inductorless low-noise amplifier (LNA) design for an ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver frontend. A current-reuse gain-enhanced noise canceling architecture is proposed, and the properties and limitations of the gainenhancement stage are discussed. Capacitive peaking is employed to improve the gain flatness and 3-dB bandwidth, at the cost of absolute gain value. The LNA circuit is fabricated in a 0.18-µm triple-well CMOS technology. Measurement result   good  matching in the implementations and a small-signal gain of 11 dB and a 3-dB bandwidth of 2–9.6 GHz are obtained. The LNA consumes 19 mW from a low supply voltage of 1.5 V. It is shown that the LNA designed without on-chip inductors achieves comparable performances with inductor-based designs. The silicon area is reduced significantly in the inductorless design, the LNA core occupies only 0.05 mm2, which is among the smallest reported designs.