Design of Coplanar Waveguide Matching Circuit for RF-CMOS Front-End

SUMMARY For enhanced performance with smaller transceiver size at microwave frequencies, a design method is proposed in which the impedance matching network is included in the filter and integrated with the antenna. In this paper, a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a power amplifier (PA) are designed by the CMOS process. A method is presented in which the input and output impedances are matched on the chip by a matching circuit using distributed transmission lines. As the distributed transmission lines, coplanar waveguides (CPW) are used for realization of miniaturized design. First, the RF characteristics of the CPW meander line are evaluated by an electromagnetic field simulator and are compared with measured results. Next, an amplifier integrated with matching circuits is designed and its performance is predicted by a simulator. The targeted frequency of operation is 2.4 GHz for wireless LAN (IEEE802.11b). © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 88(7): 19–26, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI