Third order harmonic cancellation technique for a parametric amplifier

This work presents a feed-forward technique to reduce the third order harmonic distortion of a parametric amplifier. A prototype design of an nMOS based differential parametric amplifier with supporting circuits were integrated on a standard 0.13 μm CMOS technology. A comparison between a regular parametric amplifier, and a parametric amplifier with feed-forward distortion cancellation, demonstrates a mean reduction of third order harmonic distortion of -13 dB. This comes at a cost of a maximum gain reduction of 0.9 dB.