A 30μW, 3.3dB NF CMOS LNA for Wearable WSN Applications

To meet the requirements of wearable wireless sensor networks (W-WSN), the power dissipation of the RF transceiver has to be drastically reduced. This paper presents an ultra-low power LNA with RF performance exceeding the requirement of the intended application. By reusing the current several times and employing passive gm boosting, the LNA input impedance is reduced by a factor of 24 compared to a single transistor using the same current. The resulting power consumption is only 30 mu W from a 0.8V supply. Simulation results in 40nm TSMC CMOS technology show NF of 3.3dB and gain of 14.2dB at 2.4GHz. Using a widely accepted FOM for LNAs, the proposed circuit is two times better than the best previously published one.