Ultra-Low-Power CMOS LNA Design for IoT-Enabled Wearable Biomedical Devices

Abstract

This paper is aimed at producing a very energy-efficient metal-oxide-semiconductor LNA designed to suit Internet of Things (IoT) enabled wearable biomedical devices where low size, low power and noise performance are paramount requirements. Due to the fact that wearable health monitoring systems require an uninterrupted RF connection and operate on battery power, the ability to streamline the LNA is necessary to maximize equipment life without sacrificing on the quality of the connection. The following paper will design a low-power LNA that went through a simulation with 65nm CMOS, working in 2.4 GHz ISM band. The architecture of proposed LNA includes an inductive source degeneration, current reuse, and adaptive biasing to attain a low power consumption in surety of high gain and low noise performance. The design methodology is focused on the optimization of transistor size, impedance matching and reduction of bias currents calculated at the SPICE-level using Cadence Spectre platform. The simulated LNA has a voltage gain of 15.2 dB, noise figure of 1.4 dB and input return loss below -12 dB and the overall power consumption is kept low at only 340 µW. These findings are much more efficient compared than the traditional LNA designs in wearables. This paper validates the applicability of energy-constrained IoT healthcare applications in the advanced CMOS-based LNAs. The next steps will involve complete integration of RF front end and activating it experimentally with an implementation in silicon to prove it is really real-time.