A 32-GHz non-uniform distributed amplifier in 0.18-μm CMOS

This letter presents a fully integrated distributed amplifier in a standard 0.18-μm CMOS technology. By employing a nonuniform architecture for the synthetic transmission lines, the proposed distributed amplifier exhibits enhanced performance in terms of gain and bandwidth. Drawing a dc current of 45mA from a 2.2-V supply voltage, the fabricated circuit exhibits 9.5-dB pass-band gain with a bandwidth of 32GHz while maintaining good input and output return losses over the entire frequency band. With a compact layout technique, the chip size of the distributed amplifier including the testing pads is 940×860μm
²
.