Design of LNA Amplifier for UWB receiver

Abstract

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication technology is poised to play an increasingly important role in today’s short-range communication systems as personal area network (PAN), body area network (BAN) and other wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications that require wireless connectivity and operational lifetime from a single battery charge of weeks or months. The low transmit power of UWB radios extend operating time from a single battery and eases coexistence with other wireless communication systems. The allocated 3.1–10.6 GHz bandwidth for UWB is broadly divided into two major bands; 3.1–5GHz lower band and 6–10.6 GHz higher band. In this research an integrated wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) was designed for ultra wideband (UWB) applications that can be used for high-data-rate low-power short-range wireless communications. The LNA was designed to cover the higher band of the UWB technology that extends from 6-9 GHz. Providing large gain while introducing low noise figure NF over a wide frequency range is a challenging design task. The proposed LNA consists of three stages, while the core of the design is an inductively degenerated LNA which is a popular architecture in narrow-band applications due to its superior noise and input matching properties as well as low power consumption. A methodology for extending this architecture for UWB frequency range is proposed and the LNA was designed by UMC 130nm CMOS technology using ADS simulation tool. The proposed LNA has a flat gain 12 dB in the frequency range of operation, NF 2.5 dB and the IIP3 and 1dB compression point occur at Pin of 5dBm and -5.8dBm respectively. The LNA operates at 1.2V power supply and has total power consumption 4.8mW. Mask layout of the proposed UWB LNA was designed in a 0.13μm CMOS technology using the Cadence layout tool. With a total area of 0.481×0.364 mm2.Verification for the layout designed was carried out and the performance for the LNA pre and post layout is compared to check design reliability. Finally, a comparison between the proposed LNA and other LNA’s was performed to show its performance improvement compared with other architectures