A 0.061-mm² 1–11-GHz Noise-Canceling Low-Noise Amplifier Employing Active Feedforward With Simultaneous Current and Noise Reduction

This article proposes a novel wideband common-gate (CG) common-source (CS) low-noise amplifier (LNA) with active feedforward for simultaneous current and noise reduction. By employing an active feedforward stage in the main path, the current dissipation and the thermal noise are effectively suppressed, while the noise and distortion cancelation properties of CG-CS topology are preserved. Moreover, no extra noise is introduced since the additional g
_m
-boost amplifier follows the same noise-canceling (NC) principle as the CG amplifier, and its noise can be fully canceled at the output theoretically. Thus, the proposed LNA benefits from the g
_m
-boosting and NC technique simultaneously to obtain a good tradeoff between gain, noise figure (NF), and power consumption. Fabricated in standard 40-nm CMOS technology, the measured results show the proposed LNA exhibits a peak gain of 17 dB, NF of 3.5-5.5 dB from 1 to 11 GHz and an IIP3 of -2.8 dBm at 6 GHz. It consumes 9 mW from a 1.2-V supply and occupies a very compact die area of 0.061 mm
²
.