Inductorless wideband CMOS LNAs with nonlinearity cancellation

This paper presents a robust derivative superposition technique to improve the linearity performance of wideband low noise amplifiers (LNA). The technique is validated with two LNA designs in 0.18 mu m CMOS technology, by improving the HP3 of a single-ended resistive terminated LNA by more than 10dB. Measurement results from 5 dies show that the proposed method improves IM3 over 20dB for input power up to -18dBm. A 2V inductorless broadband 0.3 to 2.8 GHz balun LNA with an active area of 0.06 mm(2) was designed and measured. It achieves noise figure of 6.5dB, HP3 of 16.8dBm, and P-1dB of 0.5dBm having a power consumption of 14.2mW. The robustness of the technique to process variations is also discussed and validated.