A five-octave broadband LNA MMIC using bandwidth enhancement and noise reduction technique

Abstract

This letter presents the design and fabrication of a five-octave broadband low noise amplifier (LNA) using 0.1-μm GaAs pseudomorphic high-electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology. The multi-peaking bandwidth enhancement and noise reduction technique is proposed for a cascode topology to significantly improve the performance of the LNA. The fabricated LNA achieves a -3 dB bandwidth of 1–32 GHz with an average gain of 12.2 dB, an excellent noise figure (NF) of 1.9-2.6 dB, and an output-referred 1 dB compression point (OP_1dB) of 10.2-12.7 dBm with good input/output matching over the entire bandwidth. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, these results demonstrate the lowest room-temperature NF ever reported for fully integrated MMIC amplifiers with a bandwidth of 1 to more than 30 GHz.