Stacked inverter-based amplifier with bandwidth enhancement by inductive peaking

This paper presents a stacked inverter-based amplifier in a commercial 65nm CMOS technology. The proposed amplifier, based on an inverter, uses stacking to achieve high output swing and distributed inductive peaking to obtain ultra-wide bandwidth. Furthermore, the proposed topology is generalized for more stacked transistors for high output swing requirement which then utilizes distributive peaking inductors to maintain that swing over a large bandwidth. The simulated output swing for a 2-, 4- and 6-stacked amplifier is 4.0 V, 6.5 V and 8.0 V with 3 dB-voltage bandwidth of 50 GHz, 43 GHz and 41.5 GHz, respectively. All transistors are regular RF MOSFETs with a 1.2 V supply voltage.