This paper presents an inductorless low-noise amplifier (LNA) design for an ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver front- end. A current-reuse gain-enhanced noise canceling architecture is proposed, and the properties and limitations of the gain- enhancement stage are discussed. Capacitive peaking is employed to improve the gain flatness and $-{hbox {3-dB}}$ bandwidth, at the cost of absolute gain value. The LNA circuit is fabricated in a 0.13-$mu{hbox {m}}$ triple-well CMOS technology. Measurement result shows that a small-signal gain of 11 dB and a $-{hbox {3-dB}}$ bandwidth of 2#x2013;9.6 GHz are obtained. Over the $-{hbox {3-dB}}$ bandwidth, the input return loss is less than $-{hbox {8.3 dB}}$, and the noise figure is 3.6#x2013;4.8 dB. The LNA consumes 19 mW from a low supply voltage of 1.5 V. It is shown that the LNA designed without on-chip inductors achieves comparable performances with inductor-based designs. The silicon area is reduced significantly in the inductorless design, the LNA core occupies only 0.05 ${hbox {mm}}{2}$, which is among the smallest reported designs.
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