A Multiband Inductor-Reuse CMOS Low-Noise Amplifier

This paper presents the design and implementation of a new multiband, multistandard CMOS low-noise amplifier (LNA) that reuses inductors for different frequency bands to minimize chip area. The idea is to adaptively reconfigure a CMOS transistor in either common source or common gate configuration to achieve narrow-band (NB) or wide-band (WB) input matching, respectively, while conveniently reusing input and load inductors for both bands. This architecture is suitable for 802.11 a/b/g and Public Safety Broadband (PSB) applications, where the NB configuration covers wireless local area network (WLAN) 802.11 b/g, while the WB configuration accommodates the PSB at 4.9 GHz and WLAN 802.11 a. Two versions of the proposed idea, a tapped-capacitor and a tapped-inductor input-matched LNA, have each been designed and fabricated in 0.13-mum CMOS and measurement results are demonstrated.