A Novel Design of Double Gain Boosting Inductor Cascode Amplifier at Near-fmax Frequencies

A novel design of double gain boosting inductor cascode amplifier at near-fmax frequencies is proposed. Based on the gain-plane approach, a study on the mechanism of gain boosting of the traditional cascode amplifier with gain boosting gate inductance is carried out. Z-embedding network, which is similar to the source degeneration inductor, is proposed to further improve the power gain. With the proposed circuit design method, a 180 GHz high gain single-stage cascode amplifier in 65 nm CMOS process is implemented. The results show a power gain of 7.7 dB in 180 GHz with 2V supply voltage, which is 6.7 dB higher than the traditional cascode amplifier.