Stacked Transconductance Boosting for Ultra-Low Power 2.4GHz RF Front-End Design

This paper presents a transconductance boosting method with a stacked current-reused inverter-based gain cell for ultra-low power RF applications. For the same bias current, the proposed method can boost the conventional inverter-based amplifier transconductance by twice, an overall quadruple boost compared to a single MOSFET in sub-threshold region. A 65nm CMOS based post-layout level implementation of the LNA including an on-chip matching network shows a 1.3 dB better noise figure as single inverter implementation for the same power of 45 μW. A cross-coupled stacked-gm VCO implementation achieves 44% higher voltage swing as that of the cross coupled single inverter at 74μA current, owing to the doubled gm value.