He Tang1, Bo Qin2, Xin Wang3, Siqiang Fan1, Lin Lin1, Albert Wang1, Jun He4
1University of California, 2Tsinghua University, 3Freescale Semiconductor, 4GSMC
A 3.1-4.8GHz LNA for lower-band UWB transceiver front-end ICs designed in a commercial 0.18µm CMOS is presented. The LNA features current reuse, resistive feedback, complete and robust full-chip ESD protection. LNA circuits with and without ESD protection are compared to minimize ESD-induced LNA performance degradation. Experiment shows a gain of 13.2dB, excellent input reflection of
-13.4dB, NF of 4.82dB for LNA with ESD protection, and the best reported ESD protection level of >7.65kV at I/O and >15kV for supply lines.