Design of Low Noise, Flat Gain CMOS-based Ultra-wideband Low Noise Amplifier for Cognitive Radio Application

ABSTRACT Cognitive radios are smart Radio Frequency (RF) communication system that senses the RF spectrum which allocates a less crowded spectrum to the user abstaining the interference of other spectrum users while confirming to Federal Communications Commission regulation. In this work, the design of an ultra-wideband low noise amplifier (50 MHz–10 GHz) for cognitive radio application adapting noise cancelling and gm-boosting techniques is presented. With the integrated noise cancelling and gm-boosting technique, the proposed low noise amplifier is able to achieve an ultra-wideband frequency response in reference to the gain and noise figure performance. Simulation result shows that the input and output matching are better than −10 dB and −7.1 dB with a gain of 11.5 ± 1.5 dB, noise figure of 3.5 ± 0.5 dB and a RF input third order intercept point ranging from −10.4 to −5.3 dBm in a frequency span from 50 MHz to 10 GHz on a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) 0.13 μm platform. The designed architecture occupies 1.19 mm2 chip area and consumes 24.2 mW of DC power from 1 V of DC supply headroom.