The increasing mask costs of modern scaled CMOS makes silicon area precious. Meanwhile, the lowering oxide thickness seriously toughens ESD protection of RF circuits, pushing towards area-demanding inductor-based ESD protection techniques. This paper presents a transformer-based ESD protection technique for inductor-based LNAs. With no area penalty, an ESD protection level of 4.5 kV HBM is achieved. Introducing two-stage protection increases the robustness up to 7.3 kV, maintaining excellent RF performance. Further it extends the TLP protection level from 3.2 to 5 A. A noise figure of 2.6 dB is achieved with a power gain of 14.8 dB, while consuming 6.5 mW. The technique serves as a solution for low-area highly protected LNAs in deep-submicron CMOS