A low power low noise VCO and a high gain LNA for WSN in 130nm CMOS RF technology

This paper mainly focuses on the performance analysis of two core building blocks of a WSN transceiver system. A typical WSN transceiver consists of many blocks of which LNA and VCO are of major importance. These two blocks are design and simulated to operate at 2.4GHz ISM band especially for WSN using 130nm CMOS RF technology. Both the LNA and VCO are designed to achieve low power and high efficiency along with less number of components as to take less area as well. The cascoded common source topology is used with inductive source degeneration to design the LNA. The minimum noise figure (NFmin) of the proposed LNA is nearly 0.472 dB and gain i.e S21 is 15.390 dB, which is excellent for WSN application. The designed LNA is unconditionally stable over the frequency range of 1 GHz to 5 GHz. The VCO is designed with current reuse -Gm cross coupled topology to achieve phase noise of as low as -130dB at 1MHz offset frequency with an extremely low power consumption of about 0.023mw. The tuning voltage (Vtune) is set accordingly for 2.4 GHz WSN application. The proposed VCO shows excellent optimization performance for low power and low phase noise along with a FOM of about -214.69 dBc/Hz which proves to be very good for a compact WSN transceiver system.