A Trimmable Cascaded Distributed Amplifier With 1.6 THz Gain-Bandwidth Product

This letter presents a distributed amplifier fabricated in a 0.13- μm SiGe BiCMOS technology for applications with large bandwidth requirements. The main design goals of large bandwidth and high gain are achieved by cascading three bandwidth-optimized traveling-wave amplifier stages. The termination resistance variations, which have large influence on the gain, are compensated by implementing electrically trimmable resistors. Measurements of the amplifier trimmed for optimum gain flatness show a gain of 18.7 dB over a 3-dB bandwidth of 180 GHz. To the authors' best knowledge, the resulting gain-bandwidth product of 1.6 THz is the highest reported to date.