Ultra-low voltage and low power UWB CMOS LNA using forward body biases

Abstract

An ultra-wideband (UWB) low noise amplifier (LNA) was designed and fabricated using 0.18μm 1.8V CMOS technology. The adoption of forward body biases (FBB) in a 3-stage distributed amplifier enables an aggressive scaling of the supply voltages and gate input voltage to 0.6V. The low voltage feature from FBB leads to more than 50% power consumption saving to 4.2mW. The measured power gain (S21) is higher than 10dB in 3.1~8.1GHz and noise figure is 2.83~4.7 dB in the wideband of 2~10GHz. Superior linearity is achieved with IIP3 as high as 4.2dBm and 12.5dBm at 6.5GHz and 10GHz, respectively.