CNTFET based grounded active inductor for broadband applications

Abstract

A new carbon nanotube field effect transistor (CNTFET) based grounded active inductor (GAI) circuit is presented in this work. The sug- gested GAI offers a tunable inductance with a very wide inductive bandwidth, high quality factor (QF) and low power dissipation. The tunability of the realized circuit is achieved through CNTFET based varactor. The proposed topology shows inductive behavior in the frequency range of 0.1–101 GHz and achieves to a maximum QF of 9125. The GAI operates at 0.7 V with 0.337 mW of power consumption. To demonstrate the performance of GAI, a broadband low noise amplifier (LNA) circuit is designed by utilizing the GAI based input matching-network. The realized LNA provides high frequency bandwidth (17.5–57 GHz), low noise figure (<3 dB) and occupies less space due to absence of any spiral inductor. Moreover, it exhibits a flat forward gain of 15.9 ± 0.9 dB, a reverse isolation less than -63 dB and input return loss less than -10 dB over the entire frequency bandwidth. The proposed CNTFET based GAI and LNA circuits are designed and verified by using HSPICE simulations with Stanford CNTFET model at 16 nm technology node.