A fully-on-chip wideband low noise amplifier for radio telescope applications

This paper presents the design and implementation of a fully on-chip wideband LNA using 0.25-micron silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) technology for the next-generation radio telescope application, the square kilometre array (SKA), which demands ultra low noise and wideband operation. The proposed LNA design employs a cascaded inductive degeneration architecture with intermediate LC architecture, resulting in a broadband input matching. The LNA is optimised for minimum noise figure (NF) by employing an external gate-source capacitor which is perfectly matched with a high quality factor (Q) inductors. After optimisation, the LNA achieved a NF from 0.56 dB to 0.67 dB over 1.1 GHz-band with a minimum gain of 14.9 dB at a 2.5-V power supply.