A Low-Noise CMOS Distributed Amplifier for Ultra-Wide-Band Applications

To employ the distributed amplification technique for the design of ultra-wide-band low-noise amplifiers, the poor noise performance of the conventional distributed amplifiers (DAs) needs to be improved. In this work, the terminating resistor of the gate transmission line, a main contributor to the overall DA's noise figure, is replaced with a resistive-inductive network. The proposed terminating network creates an intentional mismatch to reduce the noise contribution of the terminating network. The degraded input matching at low frequencies can be tolerated for ultra-wide-band applications as they need to operate above 3 GHz. Implemented in a 0.13 mum CMOS process, the proposed DA achieves a flat gain of 12 dB with an average noise figure of 3.3 dB over the 3- to 9.4-GHz band, the best reported noise performance for a CMOS DA in the literature. The amplifier dissipates 30 mW from two 0.6-V and 1-V dc power supplies.