Research in Low Noise Amplifiers in RFIDs

The amplifiers have been of great importance since the eruption of analog signals as these reduces the distortion and noise and provides us the higher gain in the transmission of signals. Beyond higher gain, power is also a major concern in the VLSI industry as the most of industries are working hard to reduce the power consumption.

Mostly in RFIDs, the Components are either discrete components or integrated circuits. Now as the demand for RFID in the market of supply and chain management is continuously growing and the RFID manufactures want to keep their cost low due to competition. Due to these reasons, latest RFIDs are on VLSI integrated circuit. These circuits are based on low power VLSI technology as the power consumption is the major issue in RFIDs.

In RFID receiver section, the Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) is the most important component. As we are working on Low power Circuits, it becomes very important to amplify the incoming signal without any distortion. The LNA is the low power circuit used to provide very high gain with minimal noise contribution. LNA sensitivity and power consumption are also two very important components. As we are dealing with analog signal here, design process of LNA keeping these entire factors in mind is very complicated task for researchers.

Several LNA circuit topologies are present today to yield a low noise figure and high gain. Most of the designs reported are based on the conventional cascaded structure, which employs two NMOS transistors stacked between the supply rails or the complementary configuration. But the latest trend in LNA research is use of multiple stages to increase the gain.they operate with a low voltage below 1V while consuming power in the range of few micro watts. Latest LNA technology is using 130nm or 90nm Cmos design process which has reduced the threshold of devices considerably and made it easy to operate near sub-threshold region.

Nowadays the research on LNA is at boom at the academics also as some of the students and researchers select LNA as their M.Tech or PhD thesis topic. We hope that the research at academia level will triumph low power Vlsi technology and reduce the power issues in the entire Analog Design topologies.

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