Articles | Volume 15
https://doi.org/10.5194/ars-15-115-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/ars-15-115-2017
21 Sep 2017
 | 21 Sep 2017

Design of a 0.13 µm SiGe Limiting Amplifier with 14.6 THz Gain-Bandwidth-Product

Sehoon Park, Xuan-Quang Du, Markus Grözing, and Manfred Berroth

Abstract. This paper presents the design of a limiting amplifier with 1-to-3 fan-out implementation in a 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology and gives a detailed guideline to determine the circuit parameters of the amplifier for optimum high-frequency performance based on simplified gain estimations. The proposed design uses a Cherry-Hooper topology for bandwidth enhancement and is optimized for maximum group delay flatness to minimize phase distortion of the input signal. With regard to a high integration density and a small chip area, the design employs no passive inductors which might be used to boost the circuit bandwidth with inductive peaking. On a RLC-extracted post-layout simulation level, the limiting amplifier exhibits a gain-bandwidth-product of 14.6 THz with 56.6 dB voltage gain and 21.5 GHz 3 dB bandwidth at a peak-to-peak input voltage of 1.5 mV. The group delay variation within the 3 dB bandwidth is less than 0.5 ps and the power dissipation at a power supply voltage of 3 V including output drivers is 837 mW.

Download
Short summary
This paper presents a new generalized design methodology based on simplified gain estimations for multi-stage Cherry–Hooper amplifiers. With the proposed approach, a limiting amplifier with 14.6 THz gain-bandwidth-product and 0.5 ps maximum group delay variation is designed.