Design of integrated reconfigurable rfcmos low-noise amplifiers for cellular and wireless systems
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Date
2016-05-01
Authors
Farshad Eshghabadi
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Abstract
The extensive growth in worldwide mobile communications has introduced new
challenges to wireless transceivers as they need to operate at a variety of frequency bands and standards. This encourages researches on multi-band multi-standard frequency-reconfigurable LNAs as an option to multiple parallel single-band LNAs. This reduces the die area and power consumption and provides higher mobility and integration. In this work, three frequency-reconfigurable techniques were introduced to design dual-band inductively-degenerated cascode LNAs with power-constrained simultaneous noise and input matching capability. The designs were implemented in 0.13-µm RFCMOS technology to operate at 900-MHz and, 1900-MHz GSM, and 2450-MHz and 3650-MHz WLAN standard bands. In addition to dual-band LNAs, two single band LNAs were developed to operate at 900-MHz and 2450-MHz for comparison purpose. The techniques introduced were hybrid of switched capacitances technique, hybrid of switched transistor-width/transconductance/Miller-capacitance technique and transformer-based variable inductance technique. The techniques introduced less capacitor area, better noise and gain performances for both bands and preserved simultaneous noise and input matching compared to conventional reconfigurable techniques. Equations were developed for initial LNA designs to evaluate the techniques before implementation. The post-layout simulation results were compared to measurement results for evaluation and verification. The measured
results satisfied all objectives of this work. The dual-band LNA designs howedxxxi
advantages of a single-band narrow-band LNA because of its high performance
together with the advantage of a wideband LNA because of its multi-band multi standard coverage. For all operating bands, all designs could achieve noise figure between 1.55 and 3.97 dB with S11 less than -10 dB as well as gains more than 13.4 dB while the power consumption were lower than 10 mW. IIP3 and P1dB as linearity metrics were better than -8 dBm and -21 dBm, respectively. The bandwidth for all LNAs were sufficient to cover the required bands for desired standards. These performances show that all design are able to meet the targeted specification for 900-MHz, 1900-MHz, 2450-MHz nd 3650-MHz bands. In addition to these findings, a new method based on electromagnetic analysis was developed that can replace the conventional post-layout simulation with RC parasitic extraction. The electromagnetic method predicted the frequency shift observed in the measurement more accurately than the conventional PLS with RC parasitic extraction. Also, using this method, designers are able to diagnose the fully-integrated LNA designs with no off-chip component before fabrication more precisely.