Low noise high linearity ultra broadband monolithic amplifier using travelling-wave gain stages

A 2-20 GHz two-cascaded dual stage MMIC distributed amplifier (2-CDSDA) is presented in this paper. It consists of two cascaded dual-stage distributed amplifiers in order to achieve flat gain, good terminal match, low noise figure and high output power level. The topology of this amplifier joins the best features of the conventional distributed amplifiers and the cascaded distributed amplifiers. The measured small signal gain was 17 /spl plusmn/ 0.57 dB from 2 to 20 GHz. A minimum noise figure of 3 dB was achieved while a 14.9 dBm of output power was measured at the 1-dB compression point. The amplifier has been fabricated using the D01PH process provided by OMMIC. The chip size is 2 /spl times/ 1.5 mm/sup 2/.