Low-Area Active-Feedback Low-Noise Amplifier Design in Scaled Digital CMOS

The emerging concept of multistandard radios calls for low-noise amplifier (LNA) solutions able to comply with their needs. Meanwhile, the increasing cost of scaled CMOS pushes towards low-area solutions in standard, digital CMOS. Feedback LNAs are able to meet both demands. This paper is devoted to the design of low-area active-feedback LNAs. We discuss the design of wideband, narrowband and multiband implementations. We demonstrate that competitive RF performance is achievable thanks to CMOS downscaling, pleasing many applications because of their low cost (digital CMOS) and low area (bondpad size).