Impact of ESD protection and power supply decoupling on 10 GHz low noise amplifier

An experimental study has been performed on the effect of 10 GHz LNAs with and without ESD protection. As well, simulations have been done to compare the effect of leaving out power supply decoupling capacitors with comparisons to measurements. For this study, two 10 GHz LNAs, one with and one without ESD protection were designed and implemented in 0.13 μm RFCMOS technology. Measured results of the LNAs showed that both have similar performance. The ESD test results showed that a Human Body Model (HBM) ESD protection threshold higher than 2 kV can be achieved without showing leakage and degradation of the S-parameters and noise figure, demonstrating that degradation of RF parameters can be minimized by choosing the appropriate ESD protection and by taking it into account early in the design process. This study also demonstrated that without on-chip power supply decoupling capacitors, the gain, matching, and noise are severely degraded.