A 0.1-6 GHz Low Noise Darlington Amplifier for UWB Applications

This paper presents a 0.1-6 GHz Darlington amplifier for UWB applications. This amplifier adopts a cascode structure for gain flatness in the working frequency band. To alleviate gain dropping in low frequency, the common emitter stage is composed of Darlington transistors. And the use of Darlington structure eliminates on-chip matching network. The presented amplifier is implemented in Global Foundry's BiCMOS8XP process and occupies only 0.32 mm². The measurement results show that from 0.1-6 GHz the input and output return loss are less than -10 dB, the gain is greater than 25.2 dB with gain fluctuation less than 1 dB, the noise figure is less than 2.7 dB in 100–500 MHz and less than 1.2dB in 0.5-6 GHz, the output 1dB compression point is greater than 9.5 dBm in 100~600 MHz and greater than 15 dBm in 0.6-6 GHz.