ESD structures impact analysis on a WLAN 802.11a LNA

Abstract

This paper presents a MMIC ESD protected low-noise amplifier manufactured in SiGe:C BiCMOS technology for the IEEE 802.11a/HiperLAN WLAN standard. The LNA operates at 5.2 GHz and achieves a measured gain of 22 dB, a noise figure of 3.3 dB and an output 1 dB compression point of -3 dBm. The amplifier also shows wideband input and output matching The ESD protection circuit has been modeled and the results have been used to study its impact in the performance of the amplifier. The LNA was mounted and measured to test the similarity with simulations.