A CMOS Active Balun Using Bond Wire Inductors and a Gain Boosting Technique

An active balun with a single-ended input and a pair of differential outputs is presented for the input stages of differential circuits. The active balun, which is composed of an input resonator and cascaded common-gate amplifiers, was implemented using 0.18-mum CMOS technology and bond wire inductors. A body-source cross-coupled configuration was used to enhance the gain of the active balun. The gain is 9.3 dB at 1.8 GHz, and the phase and the amplitude error are less than 2deg and 1 dB, respectively, in the frequency range of 1 to 2 GHz, even for a P_1dB of -2.7 dBm. The balun consumes 9 mA for 3-V supply voltage.