A BiCMOS 300 ns attack-time AGC amplifier with peak-detect-and-hold feature for high-speed wireless ATM systems

Important issues for AGC amplifiers in burst-transmission-based high speed networks such as wireless ATM are: (1) realization of sub-ms attack-times, (2) ability to detect and trace the maximum level for the preamble sequence signal to adjust the gain for determining the equalizer parameters, and (3) noise performance. To control the amplifier gain, conventional AGC amplifiers utilize a control voltage provided by the digital signal processing (DSP) unit of the system. For this reason, the minimum achievable attack-time and the gain control linearity are affected by the DSP unit and number of control bits. This fully-integrated low noise AGC amplifier includes on-chip peak-detect-and-hold gain control circuitry with short attack-time, developed for IF transceiver applications.