A Dual-Band CMOS Low-Noise Amplifier using Memristor-Based Tunable Inductors

The growing demand for multi-band and multi-standard wireless devices requires flexible architectures that can reutilize the different blocks in the RF chains to reduce size and power consumption. The traditional multi-band radio with an RF chain per band is no longer scalable. Memristive devices have shown excellent performance as RF switches and also have a small footprint. Furthermore, as they are fabricated in the back-end of line of CMOS process, they enable tunability to integrated spiral inductors. In this paper, we present the design and simulations of a dual-band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) source degenerated low-noise amplifier (LNA) using memristive-via switched tunable inductors. Owing to the tunable inductor, the dual-band LNA has negligible area overhead compared to its single-band sibling. The LNA is designed using a 0.18-μm RF CMOS technology and achieves a gain of 18.8 dB and 10.3 dB at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, respectively, and a noise figure (NF) below 2.3 dB at both bands. In addition, we present a semi-automated design methodology for the tunable inductors.