Wide-band CMOS low-noise amplifier exploiting thermal noise canceling

Known elementary wide-band amplifiers suffer from a fundamental tradeoff between noise figure (NF) and source impedance matching, which limits the NF to values typically above 3 dB. Global negative feedback can be used to break this tradeoff, however, at the price of potential instability. In contrast, this paper presents a feedforward noise-canceling technique, which allows for simultaneous noise and impedance matching, while canceling the noise and distortion contributions of the matching device. This allows for designing wide-band impedance-matching amplifiers with NF well below 3 dB, without suffering from instability issues. An amplifier realized in 0.25-μm standard CMOS shows NF values below 2.4 dB over more than one decade of bandwidth (i.e., 150-2000 MHz) and below 2 dB over more than two octaves (i.e., 250-1100 MHz). Furthermore, the total voltage gain is 13.7 dB, the -3-dB bandwidth is from 2 MHz to 1.6 GHz, the IIP2 is +12 dBm, and the IIP3 is 0 dBm. The LNA drains 14 mA from a 2.5-V supply and the die area is 0.3×0.25 mm².