A Low-voltage and Low-power Low Noise Amplifier for Ku-band Application

A low-voltage and low-power low noise amplifier (LNA) for Ku-band (12-18 GHz) application is proposed in this paper. The LNA can be used in receiver front-end for Direct Broadcasting Satellite (DBS) system. In order to decrease the power consumption and provide sufficient power gain at 12-18 GHz, a two-stage wide-band amplifier topology is presented in this circuit. In the first stage, a filter type matching network with an on-chip transformer is used as the input matching network. And this stage is to achieve the required bandwidth and reduce the chip area. In the second stage, a current-reused circuit is used to reduce the power consumption. The proposed LNA chip is fabricated by a TSMC 0.18 mu m CMOS process. The chip occupies a die area of 0.67 mm(2) (0.73 mm * 0.91 mm). The measured results show that maximum power gain (S-21) of 12.72dB, noise figure (NF) of 3.7 similar to 4.8dB and 1-dB compression points (P-1 (dB)) from -17 to -11 dBm between 12-18 GHz are obtained. The total power consumption is only 7.68 mW under 0.8V power supply voltage.