IMPROVEMENT IN LINEARITY OF

LOW NOISE AMPLIFIER

GUIDE:
Prof. F.A .Talukdar
Asst. Prof. R.H.Laskar
ECE Department
NIT Silchar
By Ram Kumar
Outline
Motivation
Introduction
Background
Basic LNA Design
Problem Formulation
Proposed Work
Reference
Motivation
Numerous co-existing wireless standards
and wireless equipment
RF Receiver




Antenna receives the entire band of signals
Stringent requirements on the receiver front-end
BPF filters the out of band channels
LNA receives the entire in-band signals
In-band channel interference problems in LNA
Intermodulation
BPF1 BPF2 LNA
LO
Mixer BPF3 IF Amp
RF front end
LOW NOISE AMPLIFIER
First gain stage in receiver
Amplify weak signal
Significant impact on noise performance
Dominate input-referred noise of front end



Impedance matching
Efficient power transfer
Better noise performance
Stable circuit
LNA
subsequent
LNA frontend
G
NF
NF NF
1

LNA Design Consideration
Noise performance
Power transfer
Impedance matching
Power consumption
Linearity

Intermodulation
Intermodulation is one of the major causes of distortion in RF
systems
When two signals with different frequencies are applied to a
non-linear system, the output in general exhibits some
components that are not harmonics of the input frequencies .
This is called inter-modulation
The 3
rd
order inter-modulation product are the interferers at
(2
1

2
), and (2
2

1
) which can appear very close to
those at
1
and
2
(when
1
-
2
is small) and cannot be
removed by a low pass filter.

IIP3
A point at which the amplitude of
fundamental and the 3
rd
intermodulation
meet called iip3.
Background
Existing Linearization Techniques
Optimum Biasing
Negative Feedback
Derivative superposition
Optimum Biasing
Current
IIP3=
gm3=0 results in very high IIP3
i
d
= g
m1
v
gs
+g
m2
v
gs
2

+g
m3
v
gs
3
+.
Optimum Biasing
Drawbacks
High IIP3 obtained over a narrow region
Process variations degrade IIP3
Limited voltage gain due to restricted input
transconductance (gm1)
Poor NF
Negative Feedback

Linearity improvement at the expense of
circuit gain
Feedback techniques not suitable at RF
frequencies
Derivative Superposition (DS) Method
problem of narrow range
with optimum biasing technique.
gm3 negative in strong inversion
and positive in weak inversion

Wide range of bias values with
small gm3 and hence
IIP3 improvement obtained
Drawbacks
Weak inversion transistor connected in
parallel degrades NF
Second order non-linearity effect on IIP3
Auxiliary transistor affects both linearity
and input match leading to increased
design steps

Circuit Diagram of inductive source
Degeneration LNA
S11 (Reflection Parameter)
Noise Figure
S21
IIP3
Problem Formulation

Increase the iip3 without sacrificing noise
figure.
For high iip3 vgs-vt should be high but it
reduces gain.
Increase the iip3 without sacrificing the gain.
Proposed work
IM3 components in the drain current of the main
transistor has the required information of its
nonlinearity

Auxiliary circuit is used to tune
the magnitude and phase
of IM3 components
Proposed work
Making an auxiliary circuit without
degradation in noise figure.
Improve output matching circuit.
Improve biasing to increase Vgs-Vt.
Making layout.
References
V. Aparin, G. Brown, and L. E. Larson, Linearization of CMOS LNAs via
optimum gate biasing, in Proc. IEEE Int. Circuits Syst. Symp.,Vancouver,
BC, Canada, May 2004, vol. 4, pp. 748751.
C. Xin and E. Snchez-Sinencio, A linearization technique for RF low noise
amplifier, in Proc. IEEE Int. Circuits Syst. Symp., Vancouver, BC, Canada,
May 2004, vol. IV, pp. 313316.
T. Lee and Y. Cheng, High-frequency characterization and modeling of
distortion behavior of MOSFETS for RF IC design, IEEE J. Solid-State
Circuits, vol. 39, no. 9, pp. 14071414, Sep. 2004.
T. Lee, The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits,
Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Choi, K., T. Mukherjee, and J. Paramesh, A linearity-enhanced wideband
low-noise amplifier," IEEE RF Integrated Circuits Symp. Dig., 127{130, June
2010.

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YOU