Design of a 10GHz LNA for Amateur Radio Operation Using AWR Software
5 www.cadence.com/go/awr
The overall simulated gain, port match, and noise performance are shown in Figures 7 and 8. For ham radio operation, the
frequency region of most interest was 10.368GHz. The overall swept performance was not extremely narrow. Figure 8 shows
a wide (2.5 octave) sweep. No extreme peaks in gain are seen at lower, out-of-band frequencies.
Figure 7: Overall LNA gain, port match, and noise performance (left) and port impedances (right)
Figure 8: Wide sweep of LNA gain, port match, and noise performance
The well-behaved out-of-band behavior displayed in Figure 8 suggests that the stability of the LNA will be good. A detailed
stability analysis confirmed this. For unconditional stability, Rollett's K factor had to be greater than unity and the B1
parameter had to remain positive. This can be seen in Figure 9.
Figure 9: LNA stability parameters K and B1
