Design of an active inductor based LNA in Silterra 130 nm CMOS process technology

In this paper, an active inductor based CMOS low noise amplifier (LNA) has been illustrated for 2.4 GHz ISM band RF receivers. The proposed LNA has three stages: the common gate amplifier, the active inductor and the output buffer. The LNA is designed in Silterra 130-nm CMOS process. It operates at 1.2V supply voltage and exhibit a high gain (S21) of 33dB and reverse isolation (S12) of -33.1dB. The power dissipation of the LNA is only 1.51mW with 8.51 dB noise figure and 35.5dB IIP3. In the proposed LNA, active inductor circuit replaces the usual passive spiral inductor to keep the size of the chip area at 0.0004mm2. Such an LNA will be a better choice for high performance, fully integrated, low cost and low power RF receivers.