A Novel Three-Stage Current-Reused Low Noise Amplifier for Ku Band Applications

A novel current-reused low noise amplifier (LNA) is proposed. Unlike normal cascaded three-stage current-reused LNA configuration in which the three common source (CS) stages are stacked and share the same current, the proposed LNA is composed of three-stage cascaded amplifiers sharing different current. The drain current of the third stage is reused by the first two stages. The LNA is fabricated in a 0.15 μm depletion mode gallium arsenide (GaAs) pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) process. The operated frequency band of the LNA is 14-18GHz (25%). The post-layout simulated results show that the LNA exhibits a maximum power gain of 25.8 dB with a variation of 1dB, a minimum noise figure (NF) of 0.98 dB, 4.89 dBm input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3), and consuming 117.5 mW from a 5 V supply.