During the past decade the intense development of wireless technologies standard such as WIFI, GSM or Bluetooth reshaped the connectivity environment of any technology customers Among those standards, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) are expected to play a key role in our future environments. The large scale spreading of such sensors has been enabled through the strong cost optimization of modern CMOS technologies. The autonomy improvement of such sensor is however a primary concern to allow any kind of remote operation within the limitation of battery life. Even though the emerging energy harvesting domain offer energy friendly environments for such sensor, the electrical autonomy remain as a tight challenge to address. Those requirements of autonomy along with the context of CMOS technology development pushes sometimes fundamental contradictions between circuit's miniaturization and decreased power consumption. In this work, we propose solutions to address simultaneously those autonomy-miniaturization requirements. The study presented here is focused on Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA) and more precisely on the specific case of inductorless design of LNA. Several innovative solutions has been proposed and realized in 65nm & 130nm CMOS technologies in order to highlight the pros and the cons of such design approach. First part of this work is focused on the design of an active inductance to address the area occupation of narrow band system using inductors. We'll explain why such approach rises fundamental limits for radio application. Second part details the design of an ultra low power broadband LNA without inductors. The proposed circuits enable significant improvement in performance tradeoffs for such low power consumption in comparison with known design techniques. We will conclude with general perspectives and other possible design approaches.
Innovating Structures for Low Power & Inductorless RF Low Noise Amplifier (LNA).