Analysis and Design of a Linear Digital Programmable Gain Amplifier in a 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology

Abstract This paper presents the analysis and the design of a fully-differential digital programmable gain amplifier (PGA) in a 0.13 µm BiCMOS technology. The PGA has a gain control range of 31 dB with 1 dB gain step size and consumes 284 mW from a 3.6 V power supply. At a maximum gain of 25 dB, the PGA exhibits a 3-dB bandwidth of 10.1 GHz. The measured gain error for all 32 possible gain settings is between –0.19/+0.46 dB at 1 GHz. Up to 13 GHz the third harmonic distortion HD3$$\it H{{D_{\rm 3}}$$ stays below –34 dB for all 32 gain settings at a differential output peak-to-peak voltage of 1 V after the last amplifier stage.