Exploiting bondwire parasitic impedance in the design of a 1.6 GHz narrow-band CMOS low noise amplifier

This paper presents a new technique for efficiently utilizing the parasitic impedance of bondwires in the design of a 1.6 GHz high performance narrow-band Low Noise Amplifier (LNA). Bondwires have reasonably predictable parasitic impedance and have much higher quality factors compared to on-chip spiral inductors. The proposed LNA design uses bondwires to provide the needed inductive reactance and does not use any on-chip spiral inductors. Series capacitors are used to control the inductive reactance of bondwires. HSPICE simulations show that the LNA achieves a noise figure NF of only 2.0 dB in 0.6 μm CMOS process technology. It has S11 of -10.04 dB, S22 of -29.3 dB, S21 of 21.2 dB, input referred IP3 of -8 dBm, and consumes 14.94 mW from a 2.5 V power supply