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Active and Passive Electronic Components
Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 284767, 7 pages
doi:10.1155/2011/284767
A K-Band RF-MEMS-Enabled Reconfigurable and Multifunctional Low-Noise Amplifier Hybrid Circuit
1Department of Subsystems Technology, Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI), SE-58330 Linköping, Sweden
2Department of Engneering Sciences, Uppsala University, SE-75105 Uppsala, Sweden
3VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, FI-02044 VTT, Espoo, Finland
4OMMIC S.A.S., 94453 Limeil-Brèvannes Cedex, France
5Department of Antennas and EM-Modelling, IMST GmbH, D-47475 Kamp-Lintfort, Germany
Received 11 July 2011; Accepted 31 August 2011
Academic Editor: Jiun Wei Horng
Copyright © 2011 R. Malmqvist et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
A K-band (18–26.5 GHz) RF-MEMS-enabled reconfigurable and multifunctional dual-path LNA hybrid circuit (optimised for lowest/highest possible noise figure/linearity, resp.) is presented, together with its subcircuit parts. The two MEMS-switched low-NF (higher gain) and high-linearity (lower gain) LNA circuits (paths) present 16.0 dB/8.2 dB, 2.8 dB/4.9 dB and 15 dBm/20 dBm of small-signal gain, noise figure, and 1 dB compression point at 24 GHz, respectively. Compared with the two (fixed) LNA subcircuits used within this design, the MEMS-switched LNA circuit functions show minimum 0.6–1.3 dB higher NF together with similar values of at 18–25 GHz. The gain of one LNA circuit path is reduced by 25–30 dB when the MEMS switch and active circuitry used within in the same switching branch are switched off to select the other LNA path and minimise power consumption.