A low noise and high gain distributed amplifier for ku band in 180nm CMOS

In this paper, we introduce a 4-stage CMOS 12– 18 GHZ distributed amplifier where each stage is a cascaded two-stage topology. We incorporate the idea of replacing the termination impedance with short circuits in both gate and drain terminations to achieve a band-pass frequency response. Using the cascaded two-stage amplifier, we achieve a reasonable gain-bandwidth performance and a smooth transfer function. For the proposed topology, we derive design formulas for low and high cutoff frequencies, input/output impedance matching, and voltage gain. Since the gate termination impedance, as a significant noise source, is replaced with short circuit in the gate line, we achieve a noise figure lower than 4 dB. The proposed amplifier provides a gain of 25 dB while consumes 40 mW from a 1.8 V supply. Our simulation results show that S11 is below −10.2 dB and S22 is below −11.4 dB.

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