1999 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

IEEE Microwave and Guided Wave Letters
Volume 9 Number 11, November 1999

Table of Contents for this issue

Complete paper in PDF format

A 74-GHz Bandwidth InAlAs/InGaAs-InP HBT Distributed Amplifier with 13-dB Gain

Y. Baeyens, R. Pullela, J. P. Mattia, H.-S. Tsai, and Y.-K. Chen

Page 461.

Abstract:

To date, distributed amplifiers based on heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT's) have consistently shown lower gain-bandwidth products than their high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) counterparts. By using improved design techniques, we report in this letter a single-stage distributed amplifier with 13-dB gain and 74 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, based on InAlAs/InGaAs-InP HBT's with 160-GHz fT and 140-GHz fmax. The high gain and bandwidth results in a gain-bandwidth product of 330 GHz, which is, to our knowledge, the highest reported for HBT-based amplifiers and rivals that of the best InP HEMT distributed amplifiers with e-beam written gate of 0.1-0.15 µm dimension.

References

  1. J. Pusl, B. Agarwal, R. Pullela, L. D. Nguyen, M. V. Le, M. J. W. Rodwell, L. Larson, J. F. Jensen, R. Y. Yu, and M. G. Case, "Capacitive-division traveling-wave amplifier with 340 GHz gain-bandwidth product," in Proc. 1995 IEEE MTT-S Int. Microwave Symp., Orlando, FL, pp. 1661-1664, 1995.
  2. S. Kimura, Y. Imai, Y. Umeda, and T. Enoki, "Loss-compensated distributed baseband amplifier IC's for optical transmission systems," IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 44, pp. 1688-1693, Oct. 1996.
  3. K. W. Kobayashi, J. Cowles, L. Tran, A. Gutierrez-Aitken, T. R. Block, A. K. Oki, and D. C. Streit, "A 50-MHz-55-GHz multidecade InP-based HBT distributed amplifier," IEEE Microwave Guided Wave Lett., vol. 10, pp. 353-355, July 1997.
  4. B. Agarwal, Q. Lee, D. Mensa, R. Pullela, J. Guthrie, and M. Rodwell, "80-GHz distributed amplifiers with transferred-substrate heterojunction bipolar transistors," IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 46, pp. 2302-2307, Dec. 1998.
  5. C. Yuen, Y. C. Pao, and N. G. Bechtel, "5-60-GHz high-gain distributed amplifier utilizing InP cascode HEMT's," IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 27, pp. 1434-1438, Oct. 1992.
  6. M. Sokolich, D. Docter, Y. Brown, A. Kramer, J. Jensen, W. Stanchina, S. Thomas, C. Fields, D. Ahmari, M. Lui, R. Martinez, and J. Duvall, "A low power 52.9 GHz static divider implemented in a manufacturable 180 GHz AlInAs/InGaAs HBT IC technology," in Proc. IEEE GaAs IC Symp., pp. 117-120, Atlanta, GA, 1998.
  7. K. Kobayashi, A. Oki, A. Guttierrez-Aitken, J. Cowles, L. Tran, T. Block, and D. Streit, "InP-based HBT technology for next-generation lightwave communications," Microwave J., pp. 22-37, June 1998.