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

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-band low-noise amplifier (LNA) in the 45-nm CMOS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. The LNA consists of three stages, with the differential cascode amplifier as the core structure. The first stage is mainly responsible for input matching to ensure favourable noise characteristics and bandwidth, while the subsequent stages increase the gain. Moreover, the LNA utilizes baluns for input/output and interstage impedance matching. Switch capacitances are added to switch the three operating bands of the LNA, which cover 17–38 GHz overall. Measurement results show that the proposed LNA achieves a gain (S21) of 23.0 dB and a noise figure (NF) of 4.0 dB.

A 0.38 V Fully Differential K-Band LNA with Transformer-Based Matching Networks

“…In order to provide a fair comparison with similar works, the figure of merit (FoM) defined in ( 4) is used in the table, where g is the linear gain of the LNA, BW is the bandwidth in Hz, F is the noise factor, P DC represents the power consumption, and area is the total circuit area. A similar definition of this (FoM) can be found in [10,15,19].…”

“…The gain and NF of the LNA are depicted in Figure 8c,d The performance of the proposed LNA is compared with recent publications in Table 2, Refs. [7][8][9][10]. Only differential LNAs are considered.…”

“…This performance trade-off results in a significant improvement of the FoM (9.63). Another 45 nm RFSOI LNA is introduced in [10] , based on a 3-stage cascode amplifier with baluns and switched capacitors to achieve multiband operation. The LNA presents a gain of 19.5 dB, a NF of 4.7 dB, but at the expense of a total power consumption of 59 mW and an area of 0.32 mm 2 , thus lowering the value of the FoM obtained with this solution.…”

“…As a result, it reduces the area of the integrated circuit and, therefore, its manufacturing costs. Numerous works available in the scientific literature introduce differential LNAs to facilitate system-on-chip integration since they provide high resilience to power supply and common-mode noise [7][8][9][10]. However, in differential circuits, the number of components and the power consumption are doubled.…”

A gm/ID-Based Low-Power LNA for Ka-Band Applications

“…Table 2 presents a comparison with some of the most relevant state-of-the-art solutions. In [ 41 ], the authors develop a mm-wave multi-band LNA in 45 nm CMOS SOI using a three-stage differential cascode with interstage transformer-based matching networks to save area. It achieves a notable gain of 19.5 dB with an NF of 4.7 dB, but at the cost of high power consumption (59 mW).…”