A comparative study on the various monolithic low noise amplifier circuit topologies for RF and microwave applications

Abstract

This paper critically compares the various monolithic low noise amplifier (LNA) circuit topologies using BICMOS or MESFET technologies for RF and microwave applications. In addition to the conventional techniques, five newly proposed schemes for the simultaneous noise and input power matching are extensively compared with each other at microwave frequencies. At L-band, the best scheme is found to be the proposed cascode inductive series feedback (CCSF) or common-source inductive series feedback (CSSL) + common-gate inductive parallel feedback (CGPF) when 0.5 mu m GaAs MESFET is used, while it is cascode resistive parallel feedback (CCPF) when npn BJT is used. At C- and X-bands, the proposed CGPF exhibits the best performance. Other than CGPF, the CSSL + CGPF seems to be the best at 6 GHz, and both CCPF + CGPF and CSSL + CGPF are recommended at 12 GHz. Finally, to verify the feasibility of this approach, a CCPF has been fabricated with 0.5 mu m GaAs MMIC technology, of which measured results agree well with the simulated ones.