A sub-2dB noise figure, 200–3700 MHz receiver for LTE-A applications

A wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) with an inherent active-balun and a wideband Downconversion Mixer are proposed in this work. For the LNA, a combination of a common-gate (CG) stage and a common-source (CS) stage is used to acquire the differential output signal out of a single-ended input while still maintaining acceptable output balancing. A positive feedback loop is added to increase the degree of freedom in choosing the design parameters. This leads to decreasing the overall noise figure (NF) without affecting the input matching performance. The LNA shows a NF below 1.86dB, gain of 25.9dB, and IIP3 of -8dBm across all band (200-3700 MHz). A minimum NF of 1.75dB was achieved at 400-1500 MHz band. For the Mixer, A dual current bleeding technique is used to maintain the linear operation at high input amplitudes to achieve high linearity reaching a maximum IIP3 value of 9.66dBm. The Mixer shows a NF of 13dB and gain 6dB. The front-end is designed in 0.13μm standard CMOS process. A total minimum NF of 1.9dB was achieved with a gain of 31.9dB.