A 0.5–44-GHz LNA With 23-dB Peak Gain and 3-dB Average NF in 28-nm CMOS Technology

A 0.5–44-GHz ultrawideband (UWB) low-noise amplifier (LNA) with 3.6-dB maximum noise figure (NF) is presented in this article. The LNA employs three-stage amplification structure, with inverter-based amplifiers as the first and third stages, and a cascode amplifier as the second stage. In order to achieve both wideband impedance matching and noise matching simultaneously, a $G_{\mathrm {m}}$ -boost resistive feedback structure and a multistage input matching configuration are utilized. To mitigate the effect of parasitic capacitances on gain in the millimeter-wave frequency band, several inductive gain-boost configurations are adopted. To verify the proposed design, the LNA is implemented in TSMC 28-nm CMOS process with 0.14-mm² core size. The measured result shows that the proposed LNA achieves 3-dB bandwidth of 0.5–44 GHz with a maximum gain of 23 dB with 20.5-mW dc power consumption. The measured NF is 2.5–3.6 dB, and the minimum $K$ -factor is 3.7. The output 1-dB compression point (OP1 dB) is −4 to 0 dBm while the input third-order intercept point (IIP3) is −18.7 to −12 dBm. In summary, this design realized a comprehensive outstanding performance with a simple structure.