A 0.092-mm² 2–12-GHz Noise-Cancelling Low-Noise Amplifier With Gain Improvement and Noise Reduction

Abstract

This brief proposes a broadband noise-cancelling (NC) common-gate (CG)-common-source (CS) low-noise amplifier (LNA) with a passive network to improve the gain and noise performance simultaneously. In the CG-CS LNA with active feedforward, a current-bleeding (CBLD) circuit is required to provide the required DC current of the auxiliary amplifier, which introduces additional noise. In the proposed work, by adding a passive network at the output, the noise of the CBLD circuit can be made negligible. Moreover, the passive network also provides the shunt peaking to facilitate the gain and noise performance over the desired band. Fabricated in TSMC 40 nm CMOS technology, the measured results show the proposed LNA exhibits a gain of 16.5 – 19.5 dB, a noise figure (NF) of 3.2 – 5.2 dB from 2 to 12 GHz and an IIP3 of −3.5 dBm at 6 GHz. It consumes 9 mW from a 1.2 V supply and occupies a very compact die area of 0.092 mm2.