An efficient design of 45-nm CMOS low-noise charge sensitive amplifier for wireless receivers

Abstract

Amplifiers are widely used in signal receiving circuits, such as antennas, medical imaging, wireless devices and many other applications. However, one of the most challenging problems when building an amplifier circuit is the noise, since it affects the quality of the intended received signal in most wireless applications. Therefore, a preamplifier is usually placed close to the main sensor to reduce the effects of interferences and to amplify the received signal without degrading the signal-to-noise ratio. Although different designs have been optimized and tested in the literature, all of them are using larger than 100 nm technologies which have led to a modest performance in terms of equivalent noise charge (ENC), gain, power consumption, and response time. In contrast, we consider in this paper a new amplifier design technology trend and move towards sub 100 nm to enhance its performance. In this work, we use a pre-well-known design of a preamplifier circuit and rebuild it using 45 nm CMOS technology, which is made for the first time in such circuits. Performance evaluation shows that our proposed scaling technology, compared with other scaling technology, extremely reduces ENC of the circuit by more than 95%. The noise spectral density and time resolution are also reduced by 25% and 95% respectively. In addition, power consumption is decreased due to the reduced channel length by 90%. As a result, all of those enhancements make our proposed circuit more suitable for medical and wireless devices.