Design and development of an S-band Low Noise Amplifier

This paper describes the design and development of a single stage Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) working at 3 GHz frequency. The single stage amplifier is designed by using commercially available p-HEMT, Filtronic (RFMD) FPD6836P70. The LNA makes use of plated through holes (PTH) to obtain good high frequency grounding of the transistor. The prototype LNA is tested at room temperature, and the measured Noise Figure (NF) and Gain is obtained as 1.03 dB and 16.3 dB respectively. The realized amplifier with distributed matching networks is found to perform reasonably well in the tests of gain, return loss and noise figure measurements in the desired frequency band. The practical results are also found to closely match with the simulated results. We present a description of the LNA design, results obtained from the measurements, and their comparison with simulated results.