Inductorless wideband CMOS LNAs with nonlinearity cancellation

This paper presents a robust derivative superposition technique to improve the linearity performance of wideband low noise amplifiers (LNA). The technique is validated with two LNA designs in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, by improving the IIP3 of a single-ended resistive terminated LNA by more than 10dB. Measurement results from 5 dies show that the proposed method improves IM3 over 20dB for input power up to -18dBm. A 2V inductorless broadband 0.3 to 2.8 GHz balun LNA with an active area of 0.06 mm² was designed and measured. It achieves noise figure of 6.5dB, IIP3 of 16.8dBm, and P1dB of 0.5dBm having a power consumption of 14.2mW. The robustness of the technique to process variations is also discussed and validated.