High performance building blocks for wireless receiver: multi-stage amplifiers and low noise amplifiers

摘要

Different wireless communication systems utilizing different standards and for multipleapplications have penetrated the normal people's life, such as Cell phone, Wireless LAN,Bluetooth, Ultra wideband (UWB) and WiMAX systems. The wireless receiver normallyserves as the primary part of the system, which heavily influences the system performance.This research concentrates on the designs of several important blocks of the receiver;multi-stage amplifier and low noise amplifier.Two novel multi-stage amplifier typologies are proposed to improve the bandwidth andreduce the silicon area for the application where a large capacitive load exists. They weredesigned using AMI 0.5 m ? CMOS technology. The simulation and measurement resultsshow they have the best Figure-of-Merits (FOMs) in terms of small signal and large signalperformances, with 4.6MHz and 9MHz bandwidth while consuming 0.38mW and 0.4mWpower from a 2V power supply. Two Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) are proposed, with one designed for narrowbandapplication and the other for UWB application. A noise reduction technique is proposed forthe differential cascode Common Source LNA (CS-LNA), which reduces the LNA NoiseFigure (NF), increases the LNA gain, and improves the LNA linearity. At the same time, anovel Common Gate LNA (CG-LNA) is proposed for UWB application, which has betterlinearity, lower power consumption, and reasonable noise performance.Finally a novel practical current injection built-in-test (BIT) technique is proposed for theRF Front-end circuits. If the off-chip component Lg and Rs values are well controlled, theproposed technique can estimate the voltage gain of the LNA with less than 1dB (8%) error.