A Fully-Integrated Low-Power 3.1-10.6GHz UWB LNA in 0.18μm CMOS

Ultra wideband (UWB) radio technology has many advantages: i.e., ultra wide 7.5 GHz spectrum bandwidth, extremely high throughput, very low power, etc. This paper presents a single-chip low-power 3.1-10.6 GHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) designed for pulse-based full-band UWB transceivers, which features an improved shunt-series feedback topology to achieve desirable ultra broadband gain and noise performance. The LNA is implemented in a commercial 0.18 μm CMOS process and the measured specifications are: a flat gain of 12 dB and a minimum noise figure (NF) of 3.8 dB across 3.1-10.6 GHz bandwidth, a very low DC power of 9.8 mW at 1.8 V supply, S₁₁ of < -9dB, and S₂₂ of < -15 dB. It achieves a gain flatness of 0.27 and a 1-dB compression point of better than -0.8 dBm