Manual design of integrated circuits has lately become obsolete, given the fact that time constraints are more and more present. Hence, designers have shifted towards automatic approaches, using various software tools, which not only ensure a speedy result, but also provide a fertile environment for further designs. Many automated design processes that address integrated circuits include one or more computational intelligence techniques, such as genetic algorithms, multi-objective optimization, neural networks or fuzzy logic. The paper presents a survey on how these techniques are used in low noise amplifiers (LNA) design. The LNA is a crucial block in the structure of a communications receiver and must meet some strict specifications. A literature review of the up-to-date papers available on the subject classifies them, based on the design technique used, and comments the main categories. The paper also identifies some issues that have not been approached so far and indicates possible future directions.