A 0.6-V +4 dBm IIP3 LC folded cascode CMOS LNA with g_m linearization

This brief presents the design guidelines of LNAs under low-supply-voltage condition with respect to linearity and demonstrates an LNA that has excellent performance even with an extremely low supply voltage. Under a low supply voltage, the drain conductance nonlinearity, which can be ignored in a high supply voltage, is important, as well as the transconductance nonlinearity. Therefore, this brief linearizes transconductance using the multiple-gated transistor (MGTR) technique and tries to obtain high drain conductance linearity with the LC folded cascode configuration. The proposed 900-MHz LNA is designed with a 130-nm CMOS process. The measurement results show a gain of 15.4 dB, a noise figure of 1.74 dB, and an IIP3 of 4.09 dBm, which is the result of the 4.94-dB improvement over a conventional LC folded cascode LNA at 5.16-mW power consumption with a 0.6-V supply voltage.