A 240-GHz Wideband LNA with Dual-Peak-Gmax Cores and Customized High-Speed Transistors in 40-nm CMOS

A 240-GHz wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) incorporating high-speed customized transistors and dual-peak-Gmax cores is proposed in this work for 6G applications. The customized transistors, designed and modeled using an electromagnetic modeling approach, reduce the gate resistance and the drain-to-gate capacitance, enhancing fmax from 288 to 394 GHz. The dual-peak-Gmax core utilizes a reciprocal embedding network consisting of two pre-embedding transmission lines and a DC-isolated Y-embedding transmission line to achieve maximum gain conditions at 221 and 261 GHz simultaneously, enabling the LNA to exhibit wideband characteristics efficiently. Implemented in a 40-nm digital CMOS technology, the proposed LNA shows a measured power gain of 16.2 dB at 220 GHz with a 3-dB bandwidth spanning from 208.6 to 223.6 GHz and a simulated noise figure of 11.5 dB while only consuming 34.7 mW from a 0.9-V supply. The measured output 1-dB compression point is -5.3 dBm at 220 GHz.