Abstract
Introduction
With the development of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) theory and technology,modern testing and measurement instruments should possess higher frequency response and precision to meet the demands of high-frequency signal measurement[
Previous works[
In this paper,a four-stage UWB LNA covering the whole W-band is proposed for instrument applications. A bypass circuit composed of dual shunt capacitors is proposed to provide a wideband RF grounding,which can reduce the inter-stage crosstalk across the four stages. A dual-resonance input matching network is designed to implement wideband input matching and noise matching. Besides,the gain of each stage is matched at different frequencies in the frequency band to achieve wideband performance.
1 Circuit design
The proposed UWB LNA is designed with the WIN semiconductor GaAs PP10-20 technology. The schematic of the LNA is shown in
Figure 1.Schematic of the proposed W-band UWB LNA
Figure 2.(a) Layout of dual shunt capacitors;(b) RF isolation of the single shunt capacitor and the dual shunt capacitors
The proposed UWB LNA is a single-ended topology. In the inter-stage matching network design of a single-ended amplifier,bypass capacitors are necessary to implement RF ground and reduce the inter-stage crosstalk. In the broadband amplifier design,the key basis is the broadband bypass RF ground. The short circuit is provided by the series resonance formed by the capacitor and the parasitic inductance of the ground back hole,as shown in
The degeneration inductor is utilized at the first stage to increase the real part of the input impedance,and make the optimum noise and gain impedance closer[
Figure 3.Optimal noise source impedances and conjugate values of the input impedances of the LNA at 75-110 GHz after input matching
The simulated gain of each stage and the whole LNA is shown in
Figure 4.Simulated gain of the first stage,second stage,third stage,fourth stage and the whole LNA
2 Measurement results
The die photograph of the proposed LNA is shown in
Figure 5.Die photograph of the proposed LNA
The measured and simulated small-signal S-parameters of the LNA are shown in
Ref. | Tech. | Freq./GHz | Perc. BW/% | Gain/dB | NF/dB | IP1dB/dBm | PDC/mW | FoM# | Area/mm2 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[ | 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT | 75-110 | 37.8 | 17-22 | 4-5* | -20 | 140 | 14.7 | 1.1 |
[ | 70 nm GaAs mHEMT | 75-95 | 23.5 | 23-27 | 2.5-2.7 | - | 40 | 203.1 | 6 |
[ | 70 nm GaN HEMT | 80-122 | 41.5 | 24-33.4 | 3.5-5.5 | -7 | 1840 | 13.6 | 3.5 |
[ | 70 nm GaN HEMT | 63-101 | 46.3 | 21-24 | 2.8-3.3 | -13 | 307 | 24.3 | 2 |
[ | 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT | 71-86 | 19.1 | 22 | 4 | -11 | 262.5 | 5.9 | 3.75 |
[ | 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT | 60-77 | 24.8 | 28 | 4.5 | - | 44 | 134 | 2 |
[ | 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT | 80-94 | 16.1 | 12 | 5 | - | 72 | 1.4 | 1.4 |
[ | 70 nm GaAs mHEMT | 57-66 | 14.6 | 23 | 1.8 | -18.8 | 54 | 64.7 | 6 |
This work | 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT | 66-112.5 | 52.1 | 16.9-20.4 | 3.9-5.1 | -12 | 88 | 26.6 | 1.85 |
Table 1. Performance comparisons with GaAs-based V/W-band LNA
In some broadband applications,the group delay performance of the amplifier in the device needs to be considered. The measured group delay shows variations of ±15 ps across the whole W-band,as shown in
The measured and simulated input 1-dB compression points (IP1dB) are shown in
Figure 6.(a) Measured (solid lines) and simulated (dashed lines) S-parameters and measured stability factor of the proposed LNA;(b) measured and simulated group delay of the proposed LNA
Figure 7.Measured and simulated input IP1dB
The noise figure (NF) of the LNA is measured by the Y-factor method[
Figure 8.NF measurement setups of the W-band LNA
The measured and simulated NFs of the LNA are shown in
Figure 9.Measured and simulated NF
The performance comparisons with state-of-the-art V/W-band LNA in GaAs technologies are summarized in
3 Conclusion
A UWB LNA fabricated by 0.1-μm GaAs pHEMT technology is presented. The dual shunt capacitor bypass circuit and the dual-resonance input matching network are proposed to achieve wideband performance. The UWB LNA exhibits 52.1% percentage bandwidth and the NF is less than 5.1 dB in W-band,which is suitable for instrument applications.
References
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