A 22–33-GHz Gm-Boosting Low-Power Noise-Canceling LNA in 40-nm CMOS Process

A new transformer-based noise-canceling low-noise amplifier (NC-LNA) is proposed for millimeter-wave (mmWave)
$K/Ka$
-band applications. The NC-LNA consists of a transformer-based
$g_{m}$
boosted common gate (CG) amplifier in the main path and a common source (CS) amplifier for an auxiliary path. The transformer is used at the input side to achieve the gain-boosting to the CG amplifier, wideband input matching. It also provides an out-of-phase RF signal to the CG amplifier and an in-phase signal to the CS amplifier. The gain control in the main and auxiliary paths and staggered tuning are implemented to achieve a low-noise figure (NF) and flat gain. The low-noise amplifier (LNA) is designed and fabricated in a 40-nm CMOS process with an active area of
$375\times 685 ~\mu \text {m}^{{2}}$
. The measured result shows that the LNA achieves a peak gain of 12.3 dB in a 3-dB bandwidth frequency of 21.9–33.7 GHz, the lowest NF of 2.8 dB while consuming 8.5 mW from 0.6 V supply. The third-order intercept point IIP3 and input referred 1-dB compression point IP1 dB are 2 and −7.7 dBm, respectively.