A low-cost 90nm RF-CMOS platform for record RF circuit performance

A 90nm CMOS technology has been used as the baseline for a low-cost RF-CMOS platform, with improved analog/RF performances of the active and passive devices. The 65 nm gate length NMOS exhibits 240GHz peak f/sub max/ and 170GHz peak f /sub T/. A peak Q of 40@5GHz is measured for a symmetrical 2.7 nH above-IC inductor. This combination leads to a world record performance of a monolithic 5 GHz RF CMOS low noise amplifier presenting a very high gain of 18dB and very low noise figure of 1.5dB, for only 4.8mW power consumption.