Carbon nanotube field-effect transistor for a low noise amplifier

Abstract

The demand for low power front-end receiver which works at ZigBee Standard had increased because it helps to increase the battery life and ZigBee Standard is used by many applications, such as sensor, Bluetooth, and wireless. One of the important parts of front-end receiver is Low Noise Amplifier (LNA). It helps to amplify the signal received before the signal is sent to the mixer. Nowadays, most of the LNA is produced by using the technology of MOSFET. However, the technology of MOSFET will reach its limit in 2020. There are a few different structures which can be used to replace MOSFET but they will also reach their channel length limit when MOSFET reach its limit. Among different materials, CNTFET is the best material to replace MOSFET because of its characteristics of high mobility, and can conduct larger current densities. This thesis focuses on single-ended CNTFET LNA design that can operate with low voltage supply and consumes low power. It is a big challenge to design a low power LNA as the performance of the LNA degrades at low voltage. Besides, it is even more challenging as the specifications need to consider the requirements of mixer. Among LNA topologies, cascode LNA gives the highest gain, which makes it suitable to be used. The technology used for this project is 32nm CNTFET. The model used is Stanford CNTFET Model for HSPICE. CosmosScope is used to view the waveform. The proposed CNTFET LNA operates at a supply voltage of 0.5V. It provides a gain of 18.17dB and acquires a noise figure (NF) of 1.38dB. The total power consumption is only 1.09µW. The specifications show that the CNTFET LNA can work well at voltage supply and is suitable to be integrated with a mixer.