A Novel On-Chip Active Dispersive Delay Line (DDL) for Analog Signal Processing

In this letter, we report the first on-chip design of an active dispersive delay line (DDL) based upon the distributed amplification structure. This distributed amplifier DDL exhibits nanosecond delay variation in the frequency band from 11 to 15 GHz. An on-chip temporal imager is implemented with this active DDL and a linear chirp generator, realized by ramping the control voltage of a voltage controlled oscillator. The experimental data exhibits pulse stretching as well as pulse compression with this system.