A Novel Gain Boosting Technique for Design of Low Power Narrow-Band RFCMOS LNAs

A novel gain boosting technique to increase the power gain of narrow-band RF low noise amplifiers is developed and verified. This technique is based on utilizing a negative resistance in the cascode configuration that is the most common configuration in designing LNAs. Using this technique, a LNA, called the negative resistance cascode LNA, was designed. The LNA operates at 7 GHz and consumes only 7.2 mW of power. It is shown that the negative resistance technique provides an additional gain of 10 dB at the cost of only 0.6 mW of extra power consumption.