A 1V 4.2mW fully integrated 2.5Gb/s CMOS limiting amplifier using folded active inductors

A 1V 4.2mW fully integrated 2.5Gb/s CMOS limiting amplifier is presented in this paper. Without any voltage boosting technique, this amplifier can work well as low as 1V supply voltage and is attributed to utilize folded active inductors. The folded active inductor not only consumes lower voltage headroom but also is area-efficient, compared to the conventional active and on-chip inductors, respectively. This work with the offset-canceling network has been implemented in a 0.25/spl mu/m CMOS process and occupies only 0.12mm/sup 2/. Measured performance shows 1.75GHz bandwidth with 39.9dB differential gain, and the power consumption is only about 4.2mW excluding the power consumption of the output buffer.