Automatic Design of High-Gain 26.5-to-29.5-GHz Transformer-Less Low-Noise Amplifier 1.86-to-8.87-mW Variants in 65-nm CMOS
Mendes, L.
;
Vaz, J.
;
Passos, F.
;
Lourenço, N.
;
Martins, R. M.
Automatic Design of High-Gain 26.5-to-29.5-GHz Transformer-Less Low-Noise Amplifier 1.86-to-8.87-mW Variants in 65-nm CMOS, Proc IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems ISCAS, Austin, United States, Vol. , pp. - , May, 2022.
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/ISCAS48785.2022.9937230
Abstract
Low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) play a significant role in modern millimeter-wave (mmWave) integrated circuit multi-standard transceiver systems. This paper proposes a transformer-less LNA based on a cascade of two AC coupled common source stages, each with inductive degeneration, for the 28-GHz 5G communications band. An automatic design methodology explores the topology design space over a 148- dimensional performance space spreading through different corners for process, voltage, and temperature. It results in about 1000 optimized LNA variants, with gains achieving up to 17.5- dB, and the noise figure and power consumption down to 2.4-dB and 1.86-mW, respectively. These performance figures position the adopted LNA’s performance boundaries with the most recent mmWave LNAs.
