A five-octave broadband LNA MMIC using bandwidth enhancement and noise reduction technique

Abstract

This letter presents the design and fabrication of a five-octave broadband low noise amplifier (LNA) using 0.1-µm GaAs pseudomorphic high-electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology. The multi-peaking bandwidth enhancement and noise reduction technique is proposed for a cascode topology to significantly improve the performance of the LNA. The fabricated LNA achieves a −3 dB bandwidth of 1-32 GHz with an average gain of 12.2 dB, an excellent noise figure (NF) of 1.9-2.6 dB, and an output-referred 1 dB compression point (OP 1dB) of 10.2-12.7 dBm with good input/output matching over the entire bandwidth. To the best of the authors' knowledge, these results demonstrate the lowest room-temperature NF ever reported for fully integrated MMIC amplifiers with a bandwidth of 1 to more than 30 GHz.

A Multi-Band LNA Covering 17–38 GHz in 45 nm CMOS SOI

“…Beyond that, in [10], the low gain was another drawback that made additional stages necessary. In comparison with CS and CG structures, the cascode LNA possesses advantageous high gain, broadband matching, and high reverse isolation, as seen in various works [1,2,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In this paper, a wideband LNA is proposed in multi-band mode based on the cascode structure.…”

A 1.6-dB minimum NF, 28-38GHz GaAs low noise amplifier using wideband multistage noise matching technique

“…However, due to the lossy silicon substrate and low carrier mobility, these LNAs have relatively poor noise figure, gain, and linearity performance. III-V semiconductors such as GaN and GaAs have significant advantages in intrinsic gain and noise performance, so they are widely used in mm-wave front-end modules [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. Furthermore, GaN technology is costly.…”