Active balun-based wideband differential LNA for noise and distortion cancellation

This paper presents a Common-Gate Common-Source (CG-CS) fully differential Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) covering about 1GHz bandwidth with center frequency of 4GHz in 0.13μm CMOS process. The technique utilizes a voltage combiner that enables low voltage operation. Conjugating an active-balun based structure with cascaded common-source in this paper enables conditionally cancelation of noise and third order distortion (IM3) product simultaneously as a post distortion technique. Simulation results exhibit that the proposed technique provides an IIP3 of 1.5 dBm, input reverse isolation and noise figure of below -12 dB and 3 dB respectively. The LNA achieves a power gain of about 11.2 dB over the bandwidth. Considering a power supply of 1 v it dissipates 16.9 mW.