A 2.6–13.7 GHz highly linear CMOS low noise amplifier for UWB applications

In this paper a highly linear differential CMOS low noise amplifier (LNA) for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications is proposed. The proposed LNA uses a linearization technique to improve both input second- and third-order intercept points (IIP2 and IIP3), simultaneously. The linearity is improved by canceling the common-mode part of all intermodulation (IM) components from the output current. Analysis and simulation results using a 90 nm RF-CMOS process with Spectre-RF show that the IIP3 and IIP2 are improved more than 11 and 35 dB, respectively, at the expense of increasing the noise figure only about 0.2 dB respected to the conventional differential common-gate (CG) LNA.