Automatic Design of High-Gain 26.5-to-29.5-GHz Transformer-Less Low-Noise Amplifier 1.86-to-8.87-mW Variants in 65-nm CMOS.

Low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) play a significant role in modern millimeter-wave (mmWave) integrated circuit multi-standard transceiver systems. This paper proposes a transformer-less LNA based on a cascade of two AC coupled common source stages, each with inductive degeneration, for the 28-GHz 5G communications band. An automatic design methodology explores the topology design space over a 148dimensional performance space spreading through different corners for process, voltage, and temperature. It results in about 1000 optimized LNA variants, with gains achieving up to 17.5dB, and the noise figure and power consumption down to 2.4-dB and 1.86-mW, respectively. These performance figures position the adopted LNA's performance boundaries with the most recent mmWave LNAs.