Design of Tunable Low-Noise Amplifier in 0.13um CMOS Technology for Multistandard RF Transceivers

The global market of mobile and wireless communications is witnessing explosive growth in size as well as radical changes. Third generation (3G) wireless systems have recently been deployed and some are still in the process. 3G wireless systems promise integration of voice and data communications with higher data rates and a superior quality of service compared to second generation systems. Unfortunately, more and more communication standards continue to be developed which ultimately requires specific RF/MW and baseband communication integrated circuits that are designed for functionality and compatibility with a specific type of network. Although communication devices such as cellular phones integrate different services such as voice, Bluetooth, GPS, and WLAN, each service requires its own dedicated radio transceiver which results in high power consumption and larger PCB area usage. With the rapid advances in silicon CMOS integrated circuit technology combined with extensive research, a global solutionswhich aims at introducing a global communication system that encompasses all communication standards appears to be emerging. State of the art CMOS technology not only has the capability of operation in the GHz range, but it also provides the advantage of low cost and high level of integration. These features propel CMOS technology as the ideal candidate for current trends, which currently aim to integrate more RF/MW circuits on the same chip. Armed with such technology ideas such as software radio look more attainable than they ever were in the past. Unfortunately, realizing true software radio for mobile applications still remains a tremendous challenge since it requires a high sampling rate and a wide-bandwidth Analog-to-Digital converter which is extremely power hungry and not suitable for battery operated mobile devices. Another approach to realize a flexible and reconfigurable RF/MW transceiver that could operate in a diverse mobile environment and provides a multiband and multistandard solution. The work presented in this thesis focuses on the design of an integrated and tunable low-noise amplifier as part of software defined radio (SDR)