A highly-linear ultra-wideband balun-LNA for cognitive radios

This paper presents an highly-linear ultrawideband balun low-noise amplifier (LNA) for cognitive radios covering the 50MHz to 10GHz band. It exploits a three-stage dc-coupled common-source amplifier, with RC degeneration at the last stage to optimize the gain, linearity and output gain-phase balancing. Designed in 65nm CMOS, throughout the covered band the simulated voltage gain is ~24dB whereas the noise figure is <;3.6dB. Due to the RC degeneration IIP
₂
and IIP
₃
reach 32.4dBm and -2dBm, respectively. The power consumption is 21.7mW at 1.2V.