Millimeter-Wave LNA and PA MMICs with 10:1 and 4:1 Bandwidth in a 35-nm Gate-Length InGaAs mHEMT Technology

This paper presents two distributed amplifier monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) considerably exceeding an octave bandwidth at the upper millimeter-wave frequency range. The first MMIC is designed as a low-noise amplifier (LNA) with a dc-coupled transistor cell in a wellestablished small-signal-optimized traveling-wave-amplifier topology. The LNA achieves a decade bandwidth with an associated S21 of more than 19.8 dB from 28 to 280 GHz. The measured noise figure (NF) of the LNA is between 2.9-6.6 dB (measured between 50-205 GHz) with an average NF of 3.5 dB between 75-150 GHz. The second MMIC is optimized for highest output power (Pout) for a 4:1 bandwidth from 50 to 200 GHz. The power amplifier (PA) is based on a gain cell with capacitive voltage division at the input of the cell. The measured Pout is better than 14.8dBm over the entire frequency range and achieves a maximum Pout of 19.5dBm at an operating frequency of 155 GHz.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, both MMICs present stateof-the-art performance in their corresponding field of plus-octave bandwidth LNAs and PAs, respectively.