Abstract
The main goals of this thesis are to design a wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) with noise figure (NF) lower than 3 dB and integrate it into the RF front-end with on-chip baluns. In order to achieve the low NF requirement, the noise canceling technique is applied to the single-ended shunt-shunt feedback LNA. The simulated NF of bandwidth-optimized LNA is lower than 3dB over the interest bandwidth from 2.4 GHz to 6 GHz and that of the noise-optimized LNA is only 1.05 dB at the target frequency, 2.6 GHz. To meet the need of highly integration, wideband active balun without any inductor is adopted for the differential conversion of single-ended RF and LO signals. Therefore, the double-balanced Gilbert-cell mixer can be used after. Simulated results show that gain error and phase error of the active balun are less than 0.75 dB and 1.55 degree, respectively. By integrating above blocks, two RF front-end circuits are designed for bandwidth and noise optimization, respectively. The test chips are fabricated by TSMC 0.18-μm 1P6M RFCMOS process. For the bandwidth-optimized RF front-end, over the whole interest bandwidth, the measured conversion power gain is from 13.8 dB to 19.7 dB and NFSSB is from 6 dB to 9.4 dB. The current consumption including output buffer is 27.2 mA under 1.8 V VDD. For the noise-optimized RF front-end, the measured results at 2.6 GHz are 21.5 dB conversion power gain, 4.58 dB NFSSB, and 15.4mA current consumption (including output buffer) under 1.8 V VDD.