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I. INTRODUCTION
Fig. 2.
rowband LNA. The design methodology as well as some practical considerations are discussed in Sections V and VI. Experimental results for a wideband fully integrated SiGe amplier
are presented in Section VII.
II. RESISTIVE FEEDBACK AMPLIFIERS
In the design of LNAs in wireless receivers, there are several common goals. These include low NF of the amplier,
reasonable gain with sufcient linearity, a stable 50- input
impedance, and low power consumption, which is needed in
portable systems. Satisfying all of the design goals of the UWB
systems is particularly difcult because of the broad bandwidth
compared to conventional wireless receivers. To demonstrate
that, let us consider the resistive feedback amplier circuit
shown in Fig. 2. The input resistance is given by
(1)
where
is the small-signal transconductance gain of the NPN
transistor.
The voltage gain is given by
(2)
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IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 39, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2004
(3)
IIP
where
is the 50- source resistance. The required linearity,
typically measured in terms of the third-order intercept point
(IIP3), is specied by
IIP
(4)
Intuitively, the higher the , the larger the loop gain, which
means more current
improves linearity [19]. A larger
consumption. However, for high-frequency operation, more
current consumption is usually needed to drive the parasitic
capacitances and obtain enough gain. This results in a little
. The voltage gain given by (2)
exibility in the choice of
and
for a given . As a result,
sets a relation between
the noise factor and input resistance are coupled because,
and
.
as shown in (1) and (3), they both depend on
Because of this tradeoff, it is generally difcult to achieve an
arbitrarily low noise factor for an input impedance of 50 with
a reasonable current consumption [2], [20]. To achieve more
design exibility, ways to decouple the noise factor from the
input impedance are needed [21], [37]. Inductor degeneration
in common-emitter LNAs was introduced by Van der Ziel
and Strutt to generate the real part needed to match the input
impedance, resulting in an improvement in the output SNR
[21]. By decoupling the input impedance from the noise factor,
this topology allows the optimization of the dynamic range
with reasonable power consumption [22]. Consider the circuit
results in an
shown in Fig. 3. The degeneration inductance
equivalent input resistance given by
(5)
is the unity gain frequency of the transistor. The rewhere
sulting equivalent circuit of the degenerated transistor consists
and
, as shown in Fig. 3. The input impedance
of the ,
and
. In
is purely resistive at the resonance frequency of
practice, an off-chip inductor
is added in series to align the
series resonance frequency with the desired frequency of operation.
IIP
IIP
(8)
IIP
(9)
(10)
. Note that, compared with (6), the noise
where
. This means that the use
factor improves only linearly with
of advanced packaging techniques like ip-chip, which allow
lower degeneration inductances, can potentially improve further
the noise gure. This also means that differential LNAs with
integrated degeneration inductors have an additional degree of
exibility compared to their single-ended counterparts in wirebond packages. Recently, some narrowband differential LNAs
were reported with very low noise gures at 56 GHz [24], [25].
ISMAIL AND ABIDI: A 310-GHz LNA WITH WIDEBAND LCLADDER MATCHING NETWORK
2271
(11)
where is the quality factor of the input matching network. The
because more voltage
noise factor improves with a higher
gain is seen across the input capacitance of the transistor.
The input impedance is resistive only in a narrow bandwidth
around the resonance frequency
. To obtain a
wideband impedance matching, the of the matching circuit
should be signicantly lowered. This will largely degrade the
noise gure which defeats the purpose. As a result, this type of
amplier cannot be used for wideband applications.
Fig. 7. Input impedance of the low-pass lter versus frequency.
(12)
It is noted that
(13)
(14)
the input impedance is mainly resistive and equal to up to
, the low-pass lter cut-off frequency in Fig. 7. In the stopband, the impedance is mainly reactive and no signal propagates
through the circuit. Using the low-pass to bandpass transfor, the series inductor is
mation
transformed to a series LC and the shunt capacitor to a parallel
LC. The fourth-order doubly terminated bandpass lter shown
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Fig. 8.
IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 39, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2004
(20)
Fig. 9.
where
and
are the input-referred current and voltage
sources of the amplier. The resulting noise factor expression is
and
which worsens quadratically with frequency. This is mainly because the gain from the input voltage to the drive voltage across
the transistor rolls off with frequency.
The IIP3 of the amplier is equal to the IIP3 of the degenerated transistor multiplied by 2 because of the potential divider
at the input across . IIP3 can be estimated by studying the
feedback applied across the transistor due to the inductive degeneration [30].
, the amplier
Neglecting the effect of the nonlinearity of
is hence given by
(16)
(17)
Interestingly, the right part of the bandpass lter looks similar to the equivalent circuit of the inductively degenerated transistor in Fig. 3. Therefore, the bandpass lter can embed the
inductively degenerated transistor and obtain the desired input
impedance, as shown in Fig. 8. This results in a broadband
impedance matching of the inductively degenerated transistor.
Now let us consider the simplied circuit in Fig. 10. In the
passband where impedance is matched [28], the current entering
and resistive. For maxthe left port of the ladder lter is
imum power transfer, all of this current must ow into the termination resistor at the right, which means that
(18)
From (17), this means that
(19)
(21)
where
is the loop gain due to degeneration and
is
the transistor thermal voltage. This means that, unlike the noise
factor, IIP3 gets better with frequency. Equation (17) also implies that
(22)
This determines the bias current. Now, to minimize the noise
factor, from (20),
should be as large as possible. As shown in
of the SiGe HBT is around 90 GHz. HowFig. 11, the peak
of 60 GHz for two reasons.
ever, the transistor is biased at an
First, it is not recommended to operate the transistor at the peak
current density which can markedly degrade the performance
due to process variations. Second, the base resistance which is a
main contributor to the noise factor is large for small transistors
3 GHz and match
and is traded off with . From (22), for
to 50 , the bias current will be 10 mA and is 7 .
ISMAIL AND ABIDI: A 310-GHz LNA WITH WIDEBAND LCLADDER MATCHING NETWORK
Fig. 11.
density.
Plot of the unity gain frequency of the transistor versus its current
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Fig. 13. Plot showing the transistor IP3 dependence on the voltage headroom
across it.
Fig. 12. Alternative bandpass ladder lter for unequal load and source
resistances.
Fig. 14. Plot showing the transistor f dependence on the voltage headroom
across it.
Fig. 15.
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Fig. 16.
IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 39, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2004
Fig. 17.
Fig. 18.
(23)
which means that will add noise uniformly at all frequencies.
Clearly, efforts to lower the base resistance will pay off with a
lower possible noise gure.
Another point of considerations is related to the high-pass
which is specied by
and , as shown
cut-off frequency
is the parasitic capacitance of the pad and of
in (16) and (17).
is specied by the input resistance,
the on-chip inductor .
to a frequency higher
as shown by (16) and (17). To push
should be less than 300 fF. As mentioned prethan 10 GHz,
viously, the quality factor of
should be sufciently high so
as not to degrade the noise gure of the circuit. There is a maximum quality factor and a self-resonance frequency associated
also
with the optimally designed spiral implementing .
causes another problem. The assumed frequency roll-off for the
is 20 dB/decade. However, at the approach of
,
transistor
the roll-off is more rapid because of the lter transition band. It
beyond 10 GHz. As a
is difcult in this technology to push
result, the noise gure increases signicantly at high frequencies, as shown in Fig. 17. Now the base resistance also affects
the input resistance
(24)
This means that, for a higher base resistance, smaller
is
higher
needed for matching. Thus, can be used to push
since, from (17),
and thus lower the in-band
roll-off. As a result, higher noise gure at lower frequencies
can be traded for lower noise gure at higher frequencies, as
shown in Fig. 16. In this way, the signal-weighted wideband
noise gure can be optimized.
Another tradeoff is in the choice of the coupling capacitor
. If
is too large, its bottom plate capacitance will add
, which effects
. If it is too small, the bandpass lter
to
will not meet the specication on
.
was chosen to be
the smallest possible value in order not to increase the parasitic
. The load resistance of the amplier
was
capacitance
increased to equalize the voltage gain transfer function to a at
response.
V. FINAL CIRCUIT
The nal wideband LNA circuit is shown in Fig. 17. The
matching circuit consists of the capacitor , which is the parasitic capacitance at the input node including the pad in parallel
in series with the
with the on-chip spiral inductor , and
on-chip spiral inductor . The cascode transistor improves reverse isolation and lowers Miller multiplied capacitance. The
in seload of the amplier consists of the on-chip inductor
ries with the polysilicon resistor
. An emitter follower inserted for measurement purposes only buffers the output to an
external 50- resistance. This emitter follower is not present
when the LNA is a part of a fully integrated UWB receiver. All
of the bias voltages and currents are generated on-chip from a
bandgap reference. The amplier draws 10 mA and the emitter
follower draws 15 mA from a 3-V supply.
The circuit was fabricated in the Jazz Semiconductor SiGe
0.18- m BICMOS process. The die photograph is shown in
Fig. 18. The total die area is 1.8 mm . All of the spiral inductors and MIM capacitors were very carefully modeled across
the band of interest and compared to measurement data from
test chips. Interconnects were modeled as transmission lines and
ISMAIL AND ABIDI: A 310-GHz LNA WITH WIDEBAND LCLADDER MATCHING NETWORK
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TABLE I
SUMMARY OF THE MEASUREMENT RESULTS
Fig. 19.
Fig. 20.
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IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 39, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2004
TABLE II
COMPARISON WITH THE STATE-OF-THE-ART REPORTED
WIDEBAND AMPLIFIERS
Fig. 21.
versus frequency.
with a conventional wideband amplier based on resistor feedback. A systematic methodology was presented to optimize the
performance of the wideband LNA. The concept is validated
through the measurement results of an SiGe wideband amplier that achieves a superior performance with moderate power
consumption.
REFERENCES
Fig. 23.
frequency while keeping the weak signal at 3.4 GHz. As expected, both in-band and out-of-band CPs increase at higher frequencies. At 3.4 GHz, the cross-band CP, which is a two-tone
test, is around 3 dB less than the in-band compression, which is
a one-tone test as predicted by theory [19]. A summary of the
rest of the measurements is also included in Table I. Table II
compares the performance of the amplier with the reported
state-of-the-art ampliers.
VIII. CONCLUSION
A new method that exploits the unique properties of ladder
lters was used to transform the well-known single-frequency
reactive matching circuit used in a low-noise tuned amplier
into a wideband matching circuit. A higher gain and lower
noise is obtained over a wide frequency range than is possible
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