170 GHz SiGe-BiCMOS Loss-Compensated Distributed Amplifier

This paper presents a travelling-wave amplifier (TWA) for wideband applications implemented in a 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology ( ft= 300 GHz, fmax= 500 GHz). The gain cell employed in the TWA is designed to compensate the synthetic-line losses at high frequencies in order to extend the bandwidth as well as the gain bandwidth product (GBP). A gain of 10 dB and a 3 dB bandwidth of 170 GHz are measured for the fabricated circuit. The circuit analysis is presented to illustrate how the bandwidth of the circuit is dominated by the cutoff frequency of the synthetic lines, thus demonstrating complete losses compensation for the band of interest. The chip required a total area of 0.38 mm ² and a power consumption of 108 mW. Compared against the state of the art, the presented design achieves the highest reported GBP per power consumption and area, as well as the highest operation frequency for silicon implementations.