250 GHz SiGe-BiCMOS Cascaded Single-Stage Distributed Amplifier

This paper presents a cascaded single-stage distributed amplifier (CSSDA) for wideband applications implemented in a 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology (f_t = 300 GHz, f_max = 500 GHz). A 3 dB upper frequency of 250 GHz, a bandwidth of 170 GHz, and a gain of 13 dB are demonstrated for the fabricated CSSDA. The circuit requires a chip area of 0.23 mm2 and 74 mW of DC power. Compared against the state of the art, the presented design achieves the highest speed and the smallest area.