## 4 Simulation Results and Comparative  
The performance of the proposed LNA was obtained with Spectre RF Simulator after performing the post-layout parasitic extraction in Cadence Virtuoso using Calibre PEX tools. The LNA consumes a DC current of 30.7 mA, resulting in a power consumption of 11.7 mW. The simulation results of the S-parameters are shown in Figure 6a. A maximum gain of 12.9 dB is obtained at 21.2 GHz, with a 3 dB bandwidth ranging from 20.3 to 24.1 GHz. The \(\mid S_{11}\mid\) and \(\mid S_{22}\mid\) are lower than 10 dB from 20.7 to 21.7 GHz and from 21.4 to 24.6 GHz, respectively. The \(\mid S_{12}\mid\) is less than 19.5 dB over the whole band. The simulated results of NF and Rollet stability factor (k-Rollet) are shown in Figure 6b. The NF has a minimum value at 22.4 GHz and varies between 2.2 and 3.5 dB within the 3 dB bandwidth. Note the amplifier is unconditionally stable as long as the value of k-Rollet is above one. The layout of the proposed LNA is shown in Figure 7.  
Figure 5: Layout of the input transformer T1 (**a**), the second transformer T2 (**b**), and the output transformer T3 (**c**), and inductance, and quality factor of transformers T1 (**d**), T2 (**e**), and T3 (**f**). Figure 6: Simulated S-parameters (**a**) and NF and Rollet stability factor (**b**), and input and output third-order intercept of the developed LNA (**c**). The simulation results of the non-linearity analysis are shown in Figure 6c, concluding that the proposed LNA achieves a P\({}_{o1 dB}\) of \(-7.3\) dBm, and an OIP3 of 7 dBm. To validate the results, a 250-occurrences Monte Carlo run is performed to determine if the performance meets the specifications under all conditions. The histograms containing the information of this analysis are presented in Figure 8a-d. As shown, the IRL (Figure 8a) is better than 8 dB and the ORL (Figure 8b) is better than 15 dB. The gain and _NF_ of the LNA are depicted in Figure 8c,d, respectively, concluding the LNA achieves a gain above 11.5 dB and an _NF_ of 2.2 dB at 22 GHz. Figure 8: Monte Carlo analysis results of the IRL (**a**), ORL (**b**), gain (**c**), and _NF_ (**d**) of the proposed LNA at 22 GHz. Figure 7: Layout of the proposed LNA. The performance of the proposed LNA is compared with recent publications in Table 2, Refs. [7; 8; 9; 10]. Only differential LNAs are considered. In order to provide a fair comparison with similar works, the figure of merit (_FoM_) defined in (4) is used in the table, where \(g\) is the linear gain of the LNA, \(BW\) is the bandwidth in Hz, \(F\) is the noise factor, \(P_{DC}\) represents the power consumption, and _area_ is the total circuit area. A similar definition of this (_FoM_) can be found in [10; 15; 19]. \[FoM=\frac{g\cdot BW}{(F-1)\cdot P_{DC}\cdot area} \tag{4}\]  
The work proposed in [7] demonstrates the design of a low-phase noise, source degenerated K-band cascode LNA with transformer-based matching networks and current steering to achieve a variable gain. The amplifier obtains a gain of 18.5 dB, with 4.1 dB \(NF\) and a 14.5 dBm OIP3. However, this high-performance circuit results in significant power consumption (67.2 mW from a 1.2 V DC power supply), which is reflected in the low value of the _FoM_ (1.71). In [8], the authors present a variable gain LNA as well, employing a split-common gate transistor technique in a two-stage cascode LNA. The authors report a very high gain of 25 dB and a low \(NF\) (3.4 dB) at 22 GHz, drawing 25.2 mW from a 1.2 V DC supply. Nevertheless, the LNA operates in a narrow bandwidth of 2 GHz. A very compact (0.11 mm\({}^{2}\)) 45 nm RFSOI 28-GHz LNA is introduced in [9], based on a source degenerated cascode with integrated baluns. The circuit achieves a gain of 9 dB, a \(NF\) of 3.1 dB, and very high linearity (IIP3 = 10 dBm), over a bandwidth of 4.5 GHz, with a total power consumption of 34 mW from a 1.8 V DC power supply. This performance trade-off results in a significant improvement of the _FoM_ (9.63).