Short Channel Output Conductance Enhancement Through Forward Body Biasing to Realize a 0.5 V 250 0.6–4.2 GHz Current-Reuse CMOS LNA

Abstract

This work examines the use of a forward body biasing (FBB) scheme to mitigate output conductance degradation due to short channel effects in ultra-low voltage (ULV) circuits with no additional power consumption. It is shown that FBB boosts the output resistance of a transistor such that the intrinsic gain reduction due to low-supply voltages can be compensated. This technique is then used to implement a low-noise amplifier (LNA) tailored for ultra-low power (ULP) and ULV applications. The proposed LNA uses common-gate (CG) NMOS 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. Moreover, a separate FBB scheme is exploited to tune the feedback coefficient. An inductive g m-boosting technique is used to increase the bandwidth of the LNA without additional power consumption. The proposed LNA is implemented in an IBM 0.13 µm 1P8M CMOS technology and occupies 0.39 mm 2 . The measured LNA has a 14 dB gain, 4 dB minimum noise figure, IIP3 of −10 dBm, and 0.6-4.2 GHz bandwidth, while consuming only 500 µA from a 0.5 V supply. The LNA operates with supplies as low as 0.4 V while maintaining good performance. Index Terms-Current-reuse, forward body bias (FBB),inductive gm-boosting, low-noise amplifier (LNA), short channel effect mitigation, tunable active shunt-feedback, ultra-low power (ULP), ultra-low voltage (ULV). His research interests include ultra-low power IC design, MEMS-based microsystems, advanced packaging, and efficient high-volume test and calibration strategies. Mourad N. El-Gamal (S'92-M'99) received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree from Ain-Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1987, the M.Sc. degree (minor in computer science) from Vanderbilt University,

Ultrawideband LNA 1960–2019: Review

“…During the 1970s-1990s, engineers usually tried to fabricate integrated wideband amplifiers by utilising the BJT, MESFET, BiFET, HEMT, MOS, CMOS and BiCMOS technologies. In the 2000s, they chiefly focussed on the CMOS, BiCMOS and HEMT processes to design integrated wideband and ultrawideband LNAs, and also, they proposed different solutions such as shunt feedback technique to control gain, bandwidth and noise, common gate topology to realise wideband input [86,88,132,134,142,149,171,174,176,202,206,207,211,214,217,244,250,251,256,262,264,268,277,285,290,298,302,303,308,310,311,321,327,341,349,360] Gain � BW/P dc � (NF − 1) Or 20log 10 134,141,206,213,217,218,231,251,277,290,…”

“…Frequency response of the active inductor load [121] F I G U R E 2 4 Schematic of the proposed inductorless differential low noise amplifier [121] carried out by focussing on improving the mentioned topologies and techniques which were presented in the 2000s for wideband LNA. As examples, we can refer to 'the noise/ distortion cancelation topologies' [164, 167, 173, 181, 189, 192, 194, 195, 201, 212, 216, 218, 220, 226, 227, 232, 233, 235, 236, 247, 254, 257-259, 266, 267, 270, 275-277, 282, 283, 287, 290, 291, 295, 298, 302, 305-307, 309, 312, 314, 317, 322, 326-328, 335, 338, 349-351, 355, 357], 'the g m -boosting topology' [164, 167, 168, 172, 176, 181, 184, 192, 194, 195, 206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 225, 227, 228, 232, 233, 236, 250, 252, 256, 266, 267, 273-277, 282, 285-287, 290, 291, 298, 302, 305-307, 309, 314, 317, 321, 326, 327, 338, 346, 349], 'the inductive peaking topology' [165,167,173,185,207,260,262,288,290,309,311,349,353], 'the current-reused technique' [174,185,188,206,225,228,274,276,285,290,298,306,315,337,338,346,349,355] and 'the AI technique' [164,179,22...…”

LAO-NCS: Laser Assisted Spin Torque Nano Oscillator-Based Neuromorphic Computing System

“…The power consumption of the CMOS sensing circuit can be estimated as the total power consumption of LNA, PD, and comparator. The power consumption of LNA at required frequency range (1.3-1.5 GHz, Figure 4A) can be estimated around 160 µW (Parvizi et al, 2016). However, this is a wideband LNA and the power consumption of narrowband LNA can be lower (Kargaran et al, 2018).…”

Ultrahigh Frequency Ultrasonic Transducers Design with Low Noise Amplifier Integrated Circuit

“…However, the on-chip bulky inductors occupy very large area which counters the purpose of high integration required in the ultrasound systems and many other applications. In addition, accurate inductor models are very difficult to build, which may lead to many times of tape-out and thus greatly increasing of the cost [15,16,17,18]. Therefore, inductor-less LNA has become more attractive in these years and several topologies had been proposed in the published literatures [19,20,21,22,23,24,25].…”