A CMOS D-band low noise amplifier with 22.4dB gain and a 3dB bandwidth of 16GHz for wireless chip to chip communication

Abstract

This paper presents a D-band six-stage low noise amplifier design in 65nm CMOS process. The single stage amplifier consists of combined cascode topology and common source topology to achieve high gain and save power consumption. For a high-data rate communication system, the wideband characteristic is very important. In order to enhance the 3 dB bandwidth, a two-center frequency technique and inductive feedback technique are used. The odd and even stages are designed to operate at 115 GHz and 125 GHz, respectively. In addition, the amplifier was realized by a conjugate matching technique to achieve low-loss between each stage. The measured results show that the low noise amplifier can provide a gain of 22.4dB with a 3dB bandwidth of 16GHz. The measured OP1dB is −4.5 dBm at 120 GHz. The minimum noise figure was 11.4dB at 117 GHz. The core chip size is 980 × 200 m2 and the power consumption of the proposed low noise amplifier is 61mW at a supply voltage of 1.7V. To the authors' knowledge, this is the best performance (gain −3dB bandwidth product) with low power consumption in 65nm CMOS at D-band frequency.