An Ultra-Low-Power Wideband Inductorless CMOS LNA With Tunable Active Shunt-Feedback

• Published in: IEEE transactions on microwave theory and techniques Vol. 64; no. 6; pp. 1843 - 1853
• Main Authors: Parvizi, Mahdi, Allidina, Karim, El-Gamal, Mourad N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Architecture; CMOS; Complementary current-reuse; Consumption; Design analysis; Feedback; forward body bias; Impedance matching; inductorless; low-noise amplifier (LNA); MOS devices; Noise measurement; Power demand; Semiconductor devices; Shunts (electrical); Transistors; tunable active shunt-feedback; ultra-low power (ULP); Wideband; inductorless; low-noise amplifier (LNA); Complementary current-reuse; tunable active shunt-feedback; forward body bias; ultra-low power (ULP)
• ISSN: 0018-9480; 1557-9670
• DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2016.2562003

This work presents and analyzes the design of a 1-V ultra-low power, compact, and wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA). The proposed LNA uses common-gate (CG) NMOS and PMOS transistors as input devices in a complementary current-reuse structure. Low power input matching is achieved by employing an active shunt-feedback architecture while the current of the feedback stage is also reused by the input transistor to improve the current efficiency of the LNA. A forward body biasing (FBB) scheme is exploited to tune the feedback coefficient. The complementary characteristics of the input stage leads to partial second-order distortion cancellation. The proposed inductorless LNA is implemented in an IBM 0.13-μm 1P8M CMOS technology and occupies only 0.0052 mm 2 . The measured LNA has a 12.3-dB gain 4.9-dB minimum noise figure (NF) input referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of -10 dBm and 0.1-2.2-GHz bandwidth (BW), while consuming only 400 μA from a 1-V supply.