A fully integrated low voltage (0.5 V) X-band CMOS low noise amplifier.

In this article, a 0.5 V X-band low noise amplifier (LNA) composed of two common-source stages is designed and fabricated with 0.18 um CMOS technology.Based on the structure of cascaded common-source stages and forward body bias technology, the supply voltage is reduced. Measurement results show that the circuit can operate at supply voltage of 0.5 V with 8 mA current occupation. The gain is 9.1 dB, noise figure is 5.0 dB, and IIP3 is −8.5 dBm at frequency of 8.9 GHz. The whole performance of the amplifier defined by two kinds of figure-of-merits is compared with some published LNAs. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 53:17-20, 2011; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.25641 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]