Put your power into SOA LNAs!

Low noise amplifiers are ultimately limited in performance and power dissipation by parasitics introduced by the IC process. The important parasitics can be determined by investigating the tradeoffs between power, performance and the performance limits of simple building blocks. Most of these parasitics are related to the silicon substrate. Silicon-On-Anything is an IC technology in which the substrate is completely substituted by another material. The technology also includes an NPN device optimized specifically for low power RF. By adapting the LNA design methods, a reduction in power dissipation by one order of magnitude has already been demonstrated. Directions for further improvements are indicated