A Broadband Gm-Boosted Active Feedback CMOS Low-Noise Amplifier for Low- and Mid-Band 5G Applications

Abstract

An inductor-less wideband LNA is designed for a 5G midband applications. The noise reduction technique is proposed to address the trade-off between input return loss $(S_{11})$ and noise figure (NF). The proposed structure combines self-cascode transistors and composite transistors to increase $g_{m}$ without consuming additional current, which can improve NF and linearity. In contrast to conventional noise cancellation techniques, the proposed technique improves the NF by reusing current without a path for noise cancellation. The proposed LNA is designed with a 0.13- $\mu $ m CMOS process and measured. In experiments, the proposed LNA shows a power gain $(S_{21})$ of 21.5 dB over a 3dB bandwidth of $0.01\sim 1$ .7 GHz, and $S_{11}$ is less than −10 dB over the range 0.01~2 GHz. Also minimum NF of proposed LNA is 1.1 dB. In case of the linearity, the proposed LNA shows an input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of −7.5 - 2.3 dBm. The power consumption is 9.1 mW from a 1.3 V supply voltage and chip area is 0.18 mm2.