High Gain and Low Power K-Band LNA With Reversed Current-Reuse Topology

This letter reports a ${K}$ -band low-noise amplifier (LNA) for millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) phased-arrays. A reversed three-stage current-reuse topology with $g_{m}$ -boost technique is proposed, which breaks the dilemma of traditional common-gate (CG) LNA facing current limitation and achieves high gain with low power consumption. The proposed LNA is fabricated with a standard 55-nm CMOS process. Measurement results show that 21.8 dB peak gain is achieved within 2.1 GHz bandwidth, while the noise figure (NF) is 4.04 dB. Benefiting from the reversed current-reuse structure, the power consumption of the LNA is only 3.05 mW from a uniform 1.2 V power supply.

I. Introduction

The large-scale phased array system used in millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) technology has evolved rapidly in response to the demand of numerous high-frequency communication applications, which establish specific performance requirements for each component [1], [2]. In particular, a low-noise amplifier (LNA), as the first stage, does not only need to fulfill the low noise figure (NF) and high gain, but also needs to maintain low power consumption and low cost due to the hundreds of RF front-end modules requirements.