A 3/5 GHz reconfigurable CMOS low-noise amplifier integrated with a four-terminal phase-change RF switch

This paper presents the first reported in-situ reconfiguration of a narrowband CMOS low noise amplifier (LNA) over two widely separated frequency bands using a GeTe phase-change (PC) switch. Previous work has demonstrated the attractiveness of CMOS-PC integration to realize high-performance reconfigurable RF front-end circuits [1-2]. Four-terminal PC switches with small form factor have been recently shown to possess close-to-ideal properties of an RF switch: a high OFF/ON resistance ratio and extremely high figure-of-merit for RF switches (F_CO = 1/(2πR_ONC_OFF)) [3-4]. In this work, we present a robust realization of a reconfigurable 3/5 GHz LNA designed and fabricated in a 0.13 μm CMOS process and flip-chip integrated with a four-terminal PC switch fabricated using an in-house process.