Transimpedance bandwidth performance of an HBT loss-compensated coplanar waveguide distributed amplifier

Author

Kobayashi, K.W. ; Tran, L.T. ; Lammert, M.D. ; Oki, A.K. ; Streit, D.C.

Author_Institution

Electron. Syst. & Technol. Div., TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, CA, USA

Volume

32

Issue

24

fYear

1996

fDate

11/21/1996 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2287

Lastpage

2288

Abstract

The authors report the results of a coplanar waveguide loss-compensated GaAs HBT distributed amplifier which achieves 48 dB Ω (25 Ω) with an upper bandwidth response of 19.3 GHz while consuming only 75 mW of DC power. The corresponding gain is 8.2 dB with a 19.5 GHz upper frequency band edge. When biased for maximum gain-bandwidth product, the amplifier dissipates 117 mW of DC power and achieves 14.5 dB gain with a 16.5 GHz bandwidth, and a corresponding transimpedance of 55 dB Ω (562 Ω) with a 14.4 GHz bandwidth. The resulting transimpedance-bandwidth product is 8.1 THz Ω which is about a factor of 2 greater than previously reported conventional HBT-based direct-coupled topologies when normalised to HBT device cut-off frequency f_T. These results suggest that the HBT-based distributed amplifier approach has performance advantages for high data rate (⩾20 Gbit/s) optical communication systems

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; MMIC amplifiers; aluminium compounds; bipolar MMIC; compensation; coplanar waveguides; distributed amplifiers; gallium arsenide; heterojunction bipolar transistors; losses; optical communication equipment; wideband amplifiers; 0 to 19.3 GHz; 14.4 to 16.5 GHz; 20 Gbit/s; 75 to 117 mW; 8.2 to 14.5 dB; AlGaAs-GaAs; HBT distributed amplifier; coplanar waveguide; high data rate optical communication; loss-compensated CPW distributed amplifier; transimpedance bandwidth performance;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Electronics Letters

Publisher

iet

ISSN

0013-5194

Type

jour

DOI

10.1049/el:19961517

Filename

556820