Sharif Digital Repository

In this thesis, we intend to explore the application of active inductors in high-performance radio receivers. The proposed active inductor uses a feed-forward path to improve the noise performance. This is done without sacrificing the quality factor and the power consumption. The proposed active inductor is designed and implemented in a standard 0.18μm CMOS technology. The measurement results show an almost three fold improvement in the noise performance, comparing to the typical existing structures. The resonance frequency of the inductor can be tuned from 1.8 GHz to 5.5 GHz, while the quality factor can be adjusted up to 30. The total current consumption of the active inductor is 4.8... 

In most radio receivers like superheterodyne receivers, a weak desired incoming signal is accompanied with many interferer signals that are much more powerful than the desired signal itself. These interferers, also called blockers, can cause a great disturbance in the functionality of the receiver. Due to gain compression and an increase in the noise figure (NF) of the receiver, the blockers should be filtered before the arrival at the output of the LNA. Because of the low quality factors of the available on chip inductors and in order to eliminate the out of band interferer signals and image frequency (in superheterodyne receivers), usually an external surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter is...