UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation describes a complete design of transmission line based 60GHz low-noise amplifier with noise-canceling technique in bulk CMOS technology. Paper starts with transceiver system review, including building blocks and the importance of LNA noise figure. Existing noise-canceling LNA topologies at sub-6GHz are reviewed. The difficulties of migrating them into 60GHz LNA design is discussed and solution is proposed. Furthermore, transmission line fundamentals are reviewed in detail. Two innovative applications of transmission line, as a voltage dividing feedback path and as input/output impedance transformer, are proposed, both with mathematical derivation and simulation validation. Finally, two 60GHz noise-canceling LNA are designed. The transmission line feedback LNA is designed, utilizing the advantage of transmission line feedback path, noise canceling and derivative superposition. This LNA has very high linearity and lowest noise figure ever recorded in any publications.