Design and Analysis of Novel Receiver Front end Subsystems in Ku band for Satellite Applications

Abstract

A novel receiver front-end; Low Noise Amplifier (LNA), mixer and Local Oscillator (LO); is designed and analyzed in Ku-band. Different design aspects of the subsystems along with the trade-offs and improvements are presented. newlineTwo different configurations of the three-stage cascaded LNAs are designed, analyzed, fabricated and tested. The aim is to design, analyze, and improve the performance parameters of three-stage LNA, especially, to minimize the noise figure while keeping considerable gain. A cumulative approach of two-port modelling and noise extraction is presented. The work is extended to the multistage circuit level analysis from the device level analysis. For the same, sixteen-element device distributed model with all possible inherent resistor temperature noise sources is considered and analyzed. Input referred noise was analyzed and presented in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic parasitics. Noise figure was analyzed in terms of correlated and uncorrelated noises, and the conditions were indentified in our case, to make the noise figure minimum by making the correlated noise ideally zero. The achieved noise figure is as low as 1.46dB (with 30.1dB gain) in Ku-band by analyzing the three-stage LNA considering gain-constrained-noise optimization, extrinsic device parasitics, stability resistor and matching networks to the next stage. Measurement results are promising in comparison with the recent relevant work published in Ku-band LNA. newline