A low‐noise current‐reused CMOS active inductor by exploiting G m ‐boosting technique

This work introduces a new low‐noise current‐reused CMOS active inductor (AI) based on Gyrator‐C configuration. In the proposed AI, a simple common‐source amplifier is utilised for boosting effective Gm and improving noise performance of the AI. While the Gm‐boosting technique improves the noise performance as well as the quality factor of the inductor, a resistor is also added to the feedback path for more quality factor improvement. Rigorous analysis of the proposed circuit shows a significant noise performance and quality factor enhancement. In order to verify the concept and confirm the mathematical analysis, the AI is designed and simulated in a commercial 0.18 μm RF‐CMOS technology. The simulation results show that the proposed inductor operates in 1 to 7.2 GHz frequency range, has a 9 nH inductance at 2.864 GHz frequency and 650 μW total power dissipation at 1.8‐V supply voltage. Maximum quality factor of 90 is achieved at 2.864 GHz frequency and a quality factor greater than 40 is obtained from 2.4 to 3.3 GHz. The input‐referred current noise of the proposed inductor is as low as 22 pA/√Hz showing 30.5% improvement compared to the conventional AI. The proposed AI is also tunable and sweeping the tuning voltage results in changing extracted inductance from 4.35 to 15.2 nH with only a chip area of 0.003 mm2. Post‐layout and different Monte Carlo simulation results also confirm the robust operation of the proposed AI against different process non‐idealities.