Low Noise Amplifiers for Low-Power Impulse-Radio Ultra Wide-Band Receivers

In this paper, two different low noise amplifiers (LNA) for impulse-radio (IR) ultra-wideband (UWB) receivers are presented. They have been designed in a 0.18 mum CMOS process, with a central frequency of 8 GHz and about 1 GHz bandwidth. The applications considered are portable applications for very short communication distances (body area networks, BAN) with bit rates up to 200 Mbps. Therefore, a crucial goal to achieve when designing the LNAs was power dissipation. In order to get very low power consumption, on/off switching technique has been implemented. Both LNAs are presented and analyzed, comparing their performances with state of the art LNAs