Design of a 0.13 µm SiGe Limiting Amplifier with 14.6 THz Gain-Bandwidth-Product

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents the design of a limiting amplifier with 1-to-3 fan-out implementation in a 0.13 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology and gives a detailed guideline to determine the circuit parameters of the amplifier for optimum high-frequency performance based on simplified gain estimations. The proposed design uses a Cherry-Hooper topology for bandwidth enhancement and is optimized for maximum group delay flatness to minimize phase distortion of the input signal. With regard to a high integration density and a small chip area, the design employs no passive inductors which might be used to boost the circuit bandwidth with inductive peaking. On a RLC-extracted post-layout simulation level, the limiting amplifier exhibits a gain-bandwidthproduct of 14.6 THz with 56.6 dB voltage gain and 21.5 GHz 3 dB bandwidth at a peak-to-peak input voltage of 1.5 mV. The group delay variation within the 3 dB bandwidth is less than 0.5 ps and the power dissipation at a power supply voltage of 3 V including output drivers is 837 mW.

An energy- and area-efficient limiting amplifier with interleaving feedback for 25Gb/s optical receiver

“…For the design of high-speed LA, SiGe BiCMOS technology is favored because of the large bandwidth and low noise characteristics of HBTs, but it normally consumes more power due to its high supply voltage [10,11,12]. Although deep-submicron CMOS technology manifests competitive advantage in energy efficiency, many bandwidth expansion techniques are necessary to support higher transmission rates since the gain bandwidth product (GBW) is limited by the relatively lower transition frequency ( ) of MOSFETs.…”