Application of Bridged T-coils to the Design of Multiplicative Gain MMIC Amplifiers

This paper investigates the design of multiplicative gain, MMIC amplifiers using planar T-coils for input, output and interstage matching. An amplifier has been realized implementing this technique, with gain, input and output return losses larger than 6 dB, 10 dB and 8 dB, respectively, in the frequency range from 50 MHz to 6 GHz. It is shown that the T-coil approach in multiplicative gain amplifying stages can lead to a favourable trade-off between gain, bandwidth and area occupation.