An ultra low-power, fully monolithic SiGe HBT distributed amplifier

Amplifiers for wireless communications applications need to be low-power, low-cost, and ultra wide-band. Distributed amplifiers promise to meet the broad band requirements. However, compound semiconductor solutions come at a high cost, and CMOS designs have thus far exhibited high parasitics and losses. There has been recent interest in fully monolithic designs using SiGe HBTs. We demonstrate a SiGe distributed amplifier with a cutoff frequency of 18.5 GHz with a power dissipation of 13 mW. This is an order of magnitude improvement over published DA designs in either SiGe or CMOS platforms. This may be reduced still further to the sub-10 mW range at the expense of slightly lower gain.