A 200 GHz Wideband and Compact Differential LNA Leveraging an Active Balun Input Stage in 16nm FinFET Technology

This paper presents a wideband and compact 200 GHz differential low-noise amplifier implemented in 16nm FinFET technology. A differential topology is enabled by employing an active balun input stage to avoid the losses of a conventional passive balun and to minimize the overall noise figure, as well as to provide wideband input matching across the signal bandwidth. Dual-peak transformer inter-stage matching networks and stagger-tuning are used in the remaining stages to achieve a wideband gain of 12 dB across a 172 - 220 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, limited by the measurement setup. The integrated noise figure across this bandwidth is 9.0 dB, with a minimum in-band noise figure of 8.3 dB. The amplifier consumes 28 mW and occupies an ultra-compact core area of 0.064 mm
²
. Compared to other CMOS low-noise amplifiers at similar frequencies, a competitive combination of bandwidth, noise figure, power consumption, and area enable the proposed low-noise amplifier to be suitable for use in next-generation high-capacity sub-THz receiver array front-ends.