An ultra-broadband low noise amplifier in GaAs 0.1-μm pHEMT process for radio astronomy application

An ultra-wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) in 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT process designed with the inductive feedback gain-boosting technique is presented. The proposed LNA is designed with the feedback structure to compensate the high frequency gain and improve the gain flatness. With only two stages, the 3-dB bandwidth of the LNA covers from 3.8 to 19.8 GHz and 1-dB bandwidth covers from 4.2 to 17.3 GHz. The measured small signal gain (S21) is 20.4 dB and the measured noise figure is 1.2 dB at 14 GHz with dc power consumption of 40 mW. The chip area is 1.5 × 1.0 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .