A Ka-band high-pass distributed amplifier in 120nm SiGe BiCMOS

Traditional low-pass distributed amplifiers have been integrated into CMOS and BiCMOS for broadband applications; however, an alternate approach is distributing amplifier stages using a high pass synthetic transmission line. A high-pass distributed amplifier is suggested using a high-pass constant-k filter structure for both the input and output lines. The four stage amplifier has a gain of 8.3 dB over a 3dB bandwidth from 21 - 42.5 GHz. S11 is below -6.3 dB while S22 is below -9.2 dB. The minimum noise figure is 6.9 dB, and output P1dB is 0 dBm. This high-pass distributed amplifier was fabricated in a 120 nm SiGe BiCMOS process. The chip area is 0.6 × 1.0 mm including the pads and consumes 28 mW from a 1.7V supply.