Low power 0.18µm CMOS ultra wideband inductor-less LNA design for UWB receiver

This paper presents an inductor-less low-noise amplifier (LNA) design for ultra-wideband (UWB) receivers and microwave access covering the frequency range from 0.4 to 5.7 GHz using 0.18-μm CMOS. Simulation results show that the voltage gain reaches a peak of 18.94 dB in-band with an upper 3-dB frequency of 5.7 GHz. The IIP3 is about -3 dBm and the noise figure (NF) ranges from 3.15-3.86 dB over the band of interest. Input matching is better than -8.79 dB and the LNA consumes 5.77 mW at 1.8 V supply voltage. A figure of merit is used to compare the proposed design with recently published wideband CMOS LNAs. The proposed design achieves a superior voltage gain and tolerable NF, with the additional advantage of removing the bulky inductors. It is shown that the designed LNA without on-chip inductors achieves comparable performances with inductor-based designs.