2004 RF AND MICROWAVE CONFERENCE, OCTOBER 5 - 6, SUBANG, SELANGOR, MALAYSIA

Low Noise Amplifier Circuit Design for 5 GHz to 6 GHz

Mohd. Zoinol Abidin Abd Aziz, Jafri B. Din, Mohd. Kamal A. Rahim

Wireless Communication Center, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia,

81300 Skudai, Johor, Malaysia.

Abstract--The development of wireless portable electronics is moving towards smaller and lighter devices. Although low noise amplifier (LNA) performance was extremely good nowadays, the design engineer still had to make some complex system trades. Many LNA were large, heavy and consumed a lot of power. The design of an LNA in Radio Frequency (RF) circuits requires the trade-off of many importance characteristics such as gain, noise figure (NF), stability, power consumption and complexity. This situation forces designers to make choices in the design of RF circuits. The designed simulation process is done using Advance Design System (ADS), while FR4 strip board is used for fabrication purposed. A single stage LNA has successfully designed with 7.78 dB forward gain and 1.53 dB noise figure, which stable along the UN11 frequency band.
1.

2. DC Biasing
In order to design a low noise device, the transistor should be biased such that the minimum noise figure is as low as possible. The device width should be chosen so that the optimum resistance is close to the driving resistance which typically 50 R. The minimum noise figure is independent of the device width. In order to keep low minimum noise figure, the cutoff frequency of the device should be much higher than the operating frequency [I]. For this project, the DC biasing circuit as shown in Figure I above, has been choose as DC biasing network. Thus, a bipolar source is needed to operate the transistor. Negative voltages need to be applied at the gate terminal. The gate voltage is then adjusted for the desired value of drain current [Z]. Transistor need biasing point at Vd (drain voltage) = 4 V and Id. (drain-source current) = 40 mA. This biasing point is obtained by using a V , (Gate voltage) range from -0.6 V to -0.4 V as shown in I-V curves found in the datasheet [Z].

Introduction

Based on S parameters of the transistor and certain performance requirements, a systematic procedure is developed for the design of LNA. To ensure the designed circuit fulfils performance requirement and could be install as a practical component in the future, one of the most popular standard followed by the market products, which is developed by Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), is taken as the major requirement that designed circuit should achieve. In LNA design, the most important factors are low noise, moderate gain, matching and stability. Besides those factors, power consumption and layout design size also need to be considered in designed works.

vg--2v Vd.5V

Vd

Figure 1: basic dc biasing network.

0-7803-8671-X/04/$20.00 02004 IEEE

In order to keep the DC source isolated from the AC signals, radial stubs will be implemented as shown in Figure 2. Radial stub has low impedance at lower frequencies however it generates high impedance at a higher frequency. The input impedance of radial stub is more consistent and suitable for broadband application. The effect of quarter-wave microstrip line is cancelled by a quarter-wave radial stub reactance [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] .

n ra

ru

r,

Figure 3: The general transistor amplifier circuit. Then the overall transducer gain is GT= GsGoGL. The effective gains from Gs and GLare due to the impedance matching of the transistor to the impedance %.

2.2 Stability Consideration

Another important consideration in amplifier design is stability. In the circuit Figure 4, oscillation is possible if either the input or output port impedance has a negative real part. > 1 or Ir,J > I . This would imply that lrinl These because of r;. and r,, depend on the source and load matching networks. While, the stability of the amplifier depends on and rLas presented by the matching networks.

Figure 2: DC biasing network with application of radial stubs.

2.1 Single Stage Amplifier

A single stage microwave transistor amplifier can be modeled by the circuit in Figure 3, where a matching network is used both sides of the transistor to transform the input and output impedance Za to the source and load impedance Zsand ZL. The most useful gain definition for amplifier design is the transducer power gain, which accounts both source and load mismatch. Thus from 1 6 1 , can be define separate effective gain factors for the input (source) matching network, the transistor itself and the output (load) matching network as follow:

Figure 4: A lossless network matching networks arbitrary load impedance to a transmission line. Alternatively, it can be shown that the amplifier will be unconditionally stable if the following necessary and sufficient conditions are met:

K = 1-l&12

-P22I2

+1AI2

(4)

*ls,2s2,

The cascode amplifiers are oflen applied in higher frequency circuits because the effective capacitance at the input is reduced. Besides, it provides a high reverse isolation and thus ensures stability. A high reverse isolation of LNA is important for the sake of avoiding LO power leakage through the LNA to the antenna thus causing interference [7][8].

The F,,, value is raising slowly as frequency increases.

5.

Measurement Result

3. Matching Network
The basic idea of impedance matching is illustrated in Figure 4, which shows an impedance matching network placed between a load impedance and transmission line. The matching network is ideally lossless to avoid unnecessary loss power and is usually designed so that looking into the matching network is Z , . Then reflections are eliminated on the transmission line to the left of the matching network, although there will be reflections between matching network and the load. Impedance matching is important for the maximum power delivered to the load, As long as the load impedance, Z,, has some nonzero real part, a matching network can always be found. Several types of matching network are available, however factors likes complexity, bandwidth, implementation and adjustability need to be considered in the matching network selection. The quarterwave transformer matching network is choose in this designed as showed in Figure 5 .

The designed LNA with matching network at 5.7 GHz was fabricated. The fabrication process were done in Wireless Communication Center (WCC) at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The designed LNA also had been tested in the laboratory. Network Analyzer (8722ES) was used to measure the S-parameter of the designed LNA[9]. The forward gain (S2J, isolation (S12), SI and S2* plot is shown in Figure 7. The result shows that the ISIII<l and IS121<l fulfills the stability condition. Thus, the designed LNA should be working stably in a frequency range of 5 GHz to 6 GHz.

Figure 7 S-parameter plot. The lowest forward gain (S2J is 6.94 The highest forward gain i s obtained at 5.5 GHz to 5.8 GHz band due to the effect of implementation matching network at this band. The designed LNA also shows a good isolation when S12value is below -10 dB at 5 GHz to 6 GHz frequency band. The highest insertion loss (S12) -14.403 dB is obtained at frequency 6 GHz.
dB at 5 GHz.

4. Noise Figure Simulation Result

The lowest noise figure is needed in order to achieve the maximum gain. Figure 6 shows the minimum noise figure plot. The highest Fm,,, 1.527 dB is obtained at frequency 6 GHz. While lowest F,,< 1.248 dB is reads at frequency 5 GHz.
ml
10

m2
lreq=S.OOOGHz

frsq=S OODGHz NFmtn=l.248

NFmin-1,527

..................

6.
..........

Conclusion

..............

1.9. GHZ

The research work has yield a new Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) circuit' design for frequency of 5 GHz to 6 GHz and circuit simulation were done in ADS. The designed LNA is tested with Agilent Network Analyzer (8722ES). LNA has successfully developed with

Figure 6: Minimum noise figure.

7.78 dB gain and 1.509 dB noise figure at frequency 5 GHz to 6 GHz.

7. Future Work
The LNA have been designed by using single stage method. In the future, cascade stage design method can be implement, which produces higher gain and low power consumption. This method will increase the LNA gain with an acceptable noise figure. Other matching network such as series stub is also simple and easier to design. Different type of transistor, which has higher forward gain and lower noise at the selected frequency if used, will yields better result. The LNA design also can be integrate with WLAN transceiver later, which is under development at WCC.

References
E. Abou-Allam, T. Manku (1998). A Low Voltage Design Technique For Low RF Integrated Circuits, Noise 1998 lEEE Proceedings of the lnternational Symposium on Circuits and Systems, ISCAS 98, Volume: 4,31 May3 June 1998.373 - 377. Agilent Technologies (2000). Application Note 1190 - Low Noise Amplifier for 900 MHz using the Agilent ATF-34143 Low Noise PHEMT, USA: Agilent Technologies. 1-8. Sorrento, R. and Roselli, L. (1992). A New Simple And Accurate Formula For

Microstrip Radial Stub, Microwave and Guided Wave Letters, IEEE, Volume: 2 Issue: 12, December 1992.480 -482. [4] Giannini, F.; Sorrentino, R.; Vrba, 1. (1984). Planar Circuit Analysis of Microstrip Radial Stub, Microwave Symposium DigesS MTT-S International, Volume: 84 Issue: 1, May 1984. 124 125. [5] Yuan Ning; Liang Changhong; Nie Xiaochun. (1999). A New Kind of Practicable Microstrip Stub. Computational Electromagnetic and Its Applications. Proceedings. (ICCEA 99) 1999 International Conference on, 1999. 398 -401. [6] D.M. Pozar (2000). Microwave and RF Wireless System, United States of America: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 7797,205-207. [7] P. Sungkyung and K. Wonchan (2001). Design of A 1.8 GHz Low-noise Amplifier For RF Front-end In A 0.8um CMOS Technology, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Volume: 47 Issue: I,Feb2001. 10-15. [8] Kuei-Ann Wen, Wen-Shen Wuen, GuoWei Huang, Liang-Po Chen, Kuang-Yu Chen, Shen-Fong LIU, Zhe-Sheng Chen, Chun-Yen Chang (2000). CMOS RFIC: Application to Wireless Transceiver Design, IEICE Trans. Electron, Volume: E83-C, 2 Feb 2000. 131 - 142. [9] Agilent Technologies (2002). 0872040392 - Users Guide: Agilent Technologies 8722ES Network Analyzer, USA: Agilent Technologies.
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Figure 5: Input and oulpul matching network schematic