544 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 40, NO.

2, FEBRUARY 2005

An Ultra-Wideband CMOS Low Noise Amplifier for 3–5-GHz UWB System

Chang-Wan Kim, Min-Suk Kang, Phan Tuan Anh, Hoon-Tae Kim, and Sang-Gug Lee

Abstract—An ultra-wideband (UWB) CMOS low noise amplifier

(LNA) topology that combines a narrowband LNA with a resistive
shunt-feedback is proposed. The resistive shunt-feedback provides
wideband input matching with small noise figure (NF) degradation
by reducing the Q-factor of the narrowband LNA input and flattens
the passband gain. The proposed UWB amplifier is implemented
in 0.18- m CMOS technology for a 3.1–5-GHz UWB system. Mea-
surements show a 3-dB gain bandwidth of 2–4.6 GHz, a min-
imum NF of 2.3 dB, a power gain of 9.8 dB, better than 9 dB
of input matching, and an input IP3 of 7 dBm, while consuming
only 12.6 mW of power.
Index Terms—Broadband, CMOS, feedback, low noise ampli-
fier, RF, ultra-wideband.

I. INTRODUCTION

R ECENTLY, the interest in ultra-wideband (UWB) system

for wireless personal area network (WPAN) application
has increased significantly, though the international standard has
yet to be finalized. The allocated frequency band of the UWB
system is 3.1–10.6 GHz (low-frequency band: 3.1–5 GHz; high-
frequency band: 6–10.6 GHz). Two recent major proposals [1],
[2] for the IEEE 802.15.3a propose that data rates of up to
400–480 Mb/s can be obtained using only the low-frequency Fig. 1. Narrowband LNA topology. (a) Overall schematic. (b) Small-signal
band. The low-frequency band has been allocated for the devel- equivalent circuit at the input.
opment of the first-generation UWB system. CMOS technology
is a satisfactory choice for the implementation of the low band dependence for voltage gain on the transconductance of the am-
UWB system when considering the time to market, hardware plifying transistor. Recently, a new topology of a wideband am-
cost, the degree of difficulty, etc. plifier for UWB system, which adopts a bandpass filter at
Until now, reported CMOS-based wideband amplifiers tend the input of the cascode low noise amplifier (LNA) for wideband
to be dominated by two different topologies: the distributed input matching, has been reported in [8] and [9]. The bandpass
and resistive shunt-feedback amplifiers. The distributed ampli- filter-based topology incorporates the input impedance of the
fiers [3], [4] normally provide wide bandwidth characteristics cascode amplifier as a part of the filter, and shows good perfor-
but tend to consume large dc current due to the distribution of mances while dissipating small amounts of dc power. However,
multiple amplifying stages, which makes them unsuitable for the adoption of the filter at the input mandates a number of
low-power application. The resistive shunt-feedback-based am- reactive elements, which could lead to a larger chip area and NF
plifiers [5], [6] provide good wideband matching and flat gain, degradation in the case of on-chip implementation, or the addi-
but tend to suffer from poor noise figure (NF) and large power tional external components.
dissipation. In the resistive shunt-feedback amplifier, input re- This paper proposes a new low power, low noise, and wide-
sistance is determined by the feedback resistance divided by band amplifier combining a narrowband LNA with the con-
the loop-gain of the feedback amplifier [7]. Therefore, the feed- ventional resistive shunt-feedback. The design principles and
back resistor tends to be a few hundred ohms in order to match the measurement results of the implemented 3.1–5-GHz UWB
the low signal source resistance of typically 50 , leading to LNA are described.
significant NF degradation. Furthermore, even with a moderate
amount of voltage gain, the amplifier requires a rather large II. DESIGN OF WIDEBAND AMPLIFIER
amount of current, especially in the CMOS, due to its strong
Fig. 1(a) shows a typical narrowband cascode LNA topology.
In Fig. 1(a), the inductor is added for simultaneous noise and
Manuscript received April 8, 2004; revised August 26, 2004.
C.-W. Kim, M.-S. Kang, P. T. Anh, and S.-G. Lee are with the Information input matching and for the impedance matching between the
and Communications University, Yuseong, Daejeon, 305-600, Korea (e-mail: source resistance and the input of the LNA [10]. Fig. 1(b)
[email protected]). shows the small-signal equivalent circuit for the input part of the
H.-T. Kim is with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Suwon
440-600, Korea. overall LNA, where represents the gate-source capacitance
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSSC.2004.840951 of the input transistor . In Fig. 1(b), a series combination
0018-9200/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 40, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2005 545

Fig. 3. Simulated S traces of LNA with or without the feedback resistor for
frequencies over 3–5 GHz.

Fig. 2. UWB LNA topology. (a) Overall schematic. (b) Small-signal

equivalent circuit at the input. proposed topology, the input impedance is determined by .
Therefore, in Fig. 2(a), one of the key roles of the feedback re-
of reactive elements is chosen to resonate at the frequencies of sistor is to reduce the -factor of the resonating narrowband
interest such that becomes a real value with being LNA input circuit. The -factor of the circuit shown in Fig. 2(b)
equal to . The represents the cutoff frequency of transistor can be approximately given by
. The quality factor of the series resonating input circuit
shown in Fig. 1(b) can be given by [11] (2)

(1)
From (2), and considering the inversely linear relation between
the 3-dB bandwidth and the -factor, the narrowband LNA
where represents the resonant frequency. With a typical in Fig. 2(a) can be converted into a wideband amplifier by the
LNA, the -factor shown in (1) is generally preferred to be high proper selection of .
for high-gain and low-noise performance while dissipating low For example, to design a wideband amplifier that covers a
dc power. Since the fractional 3-dB bandwidth of a typical certain frequency band, the narrowband amplifier will be opti-
series resonant circuit is inversely proportional to its mized at the center frequency. Then, the 3-dB bandwidth of
-factor , the LNA shown in Fig. 1(a) the small-signal equivalent input circuit can be set by the proper
is unsuitable for wideband application. selection of . Depending on the amount of bandwidth, the
Fig. 2(a) shows the proposed wideband LNA topology. In required value of can vary and so will the amount of noise
Fig. 2(a), is added as a shunt-feedback element to the con- contribution by . Fig. 3 shows the simulated of the de-
ventional cascode narrowband LNA and is used as shunt signed UWB amplifier with and compares that of
peaking inductor at the output [12]. The capacitor is used the amplifier without the feedback resistor . As can be seen
for the ac coupling purpose. The source follower, composed of in Fig. 3, compared to the narrowband case, the addition of
and , is added for measurement proposes only, and pro- gathers the values of passband closer to the center of the
vides wideband output matching. and are ac coupling Smith chart, leading to wideband input matching. The feedback
capacitors. resistor also provides its conventional roles of flattening the
Fig. 2(b) shows the small-signal equivalent circuit for the gain over a wider bandwidth of frequencies with much smaller
input part of the proposed wideband LNA. In Fig. 2(b), the re- noise figure degradation.
sistor represents the Miller equivalent
input resistance of , where is the open-loop voltage gain
III. AMPLIFIER DESIGN AND MEASUREMENT RESULTS
of the LNA. From Fig. 2(a) and (b), the value of can be much
larger than that of the conventional resistive shunt-feedback. In The proposed topology shown in Fig. 2(a) is applied to
the conventional resistive shunt-feedback, the size of is lim- a 3.1–5-GHz wideband amplifier based on 0.18- m CMOS
ited as determines the input impedance. However, in the technology. The narrowband LNA is optimized at 4 GHz by the
546 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 40, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2005

Fig. 5. Measured and simulated NF of the UWB LNA.

Fig. 4. Measured power gain, input/output return loss, and reverse isolation of
the UWB LNA.

proper selection of the values for and . With feedback re-

sistor , the bandwidth extends to cover 3–5 GHz. In Fig. 2(a),
the input transistor m is biased at
7 mA. The size of the cascode transistor m
is decided considering a trade-off between gain and
3-dB bandwidth. The value of the on-chip spiral inductor
is 2.4 nH, and its quality factor ( ) is about 9.5 at 5 GHz.
The source follower, which consists of m and
m , consumes 2 mA. Although is
optimal from the simulation results due to the respectable noise
performance, the value of is adjusted as 1 in order to
guarantee wideband input matching. In Fig. 2(a), the inductors
and are implemented as external components with a
value of 0.6 nH and 2.5 nH, respectively. These inductors can
be absorbed as a part of the package parasitics, but in this work
they are implemented with bond wires due to the chip-on-board
(COB) evaluation of the fabricated chip. Other component
Fig. 6. Microphotograph of the fabricated UWB CMOS LNA. The inductors
values are pF, pF, and . L and L are implemented as external components.
For the evaluation, from Fig. 2(a), the dc biasing nodes ,
, and are biased separately through external
up to 4 GHz, but rises up to 5.2 dB at 5 GHz. Compared to the
voltage sources. Fig. 4 shows the measured S-parameters of the
simulation, the steep increase in NF near 5 GHz is caused by
designed UWB amplifier. As can be seen in Fig. 4, the measured
the lower power gain at these frequencies. The discrepancy in
input return loss is higher than 9.0 dB over a 3–5-GHz
NF between the simulation and measurements at the 2–4-GHz
range. The output return loss is higher than 11 dB for the
range is the result of inaccuracies in the transistor noise model.
same frequency range due to the source follower output stage.
From the simulation, the feedback resistor degrades the am-
The maximum power gain is 9.8 dB and the 3-dB
plifier NF to approximately 0.6 dB. The input referred IP3 is
bandwidth covers 2–4.6 GHz. In Fig. 4, the amplifier shows
measured as 7 dBm for the two-tone signals of 4 GHz and
early power gain roll off near 4.6 GHz compared to the sim-
4.5 GHz. Fig. 6 shows the microphotograph of the fabricated
ulated value of 5 GHz. This is caused by the increase in value of
CMOS UWB LNA with a chip size of 0.9 mm . Table I sum-
the peaking inductance due to the addition of external bonding
marizes the measurement results and compares them with previ-
wires to the supply voltage, which had not been counted prop-
ously reported works. In Table I, the indicated amount of power
erly during the simulation. As can be seen from Fig. 4, the re-
dissipation for this work represents the power dissipated in the
verse isolation approaches the 20-dB range due to the
cascode topology only.
feedback network. Considering the reverse isolation provided
by the source follower stage, the amount of reverse isolation is
worse than expected. Fig. 5 shows both the measured and simu- IV. CONCLUSION
lated NF of the implemented amplifier. The measured NF shows A new CMOS UWB LNA, applied to the lower band
a minimum value of 2.3 dB at 3 GHz and stays at less than 3 dB (3.1–5 GHz) UWB system, is presented. The proposed ampli-
IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 40, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2005 547

TABLE I
COMPARISON OF WIDEBAND CMOS LNA PERFORMANCES: PUBLISHED AND THE PRESENT WORKS

fier topology adopts the conventional resistive shunt-feedback

onto a narrowband LNA topology. In the proposed topology,
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