A wideband low noise distributed amplifier with active termination

In this paper, a distributed amplifier (DA) with a feed forward path is presented to reduce noise effects of input matching termination at the output. The proposed active termination (AT) technique also improves the amplifier gain without increasing its power consumption. To validate the introduced method, a four-stage wideband actively terminated DA (ATDA) is designed in a 0.18μm CMOS technology and compared with a conventional DA (CDA) with passive termination. Simulation results show that the proposed technique improves the average noise figure (NF) of the DA by 0.6 dB and increases its gain by about 2 dB in a frequency range from 100MHz to 12 GHz, without increasing the power consumption.