A novel design approach for GHz CMOS low noise amplifiers

A novel design method for GHz CMOS low noise amplifiers (LNA) is presented. The cascode LNA is considered as a two-stage amplifier. Considering the high isolation property of the common-gate stage, the two stages can be designed separately. This makes the design easy and straightforward. An off-chip inductor is used as the inter-stage matching component, which increases the overall gain and decreases the noise figure. Using this method, a 2.4 GHz LNA is designed and simulation results are shown.