Wideband SiGe-HBT Low-Noise Amplifier with Resistive Feedback and Shunt Peaking

Ickhyun Song; Gyungtae Ryu; Seung Hwan Jung; John D Cressler; Moon-Kyu Cho

doi:10.3390/s23156745

Wideband SiGe-HBT Low-Noise Amplifier with Resistive Feedback and Shunt Peaking

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jul 28;23(15):6745. doi: 10.3390/s23156745.

Authors

Ickhyun Song¹, Gyungtae Ryu², Seung Hwan Jung³, John D Cressler⁴, Moon-Kyu Cho⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electronic Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, Republic of Korea.
² Division of Nanoscale Semiconductor Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul 04763, Republic of Korea.
³ GRIT Custom-IC Corp., Seoul 01886, Republic of Korea.
⁴ School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30318, USA.
⁵ Department of Computer Engineering, Korea National University of Transportation, Chungju-si 27469, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

In this work, the design of a wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) using a resistive feedback network is proposed for potential multi-band sensing, communication, and radar applications. For achieving wide operational bandwidth and flat in-band characteristics simultaneously, the proposed LNA employs a variety of circuit design techniques, including a voltage-current (shunt-shunt) negative feedback configuration, inductive emitter degeneration, a main branch with an added cascode stage, and the shunt-peaking technique. The use of a feedback network and emitter degeneration provides broadened transfer characteristics for multi-octave coverage and a real impedance for input matching, respectively. In addition, the cascode stage pushes the band-limiting low-frequency pole, due to the Miller capacitance, to a higher frequency. Lastly, the shunt-peaking approach is optimized for the compensation of a gain reduction at higher frequency bands. The wideband LNA proposed in this study is fabricated using a commercial 0.13 μm silicon-germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS process, employing SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) as the circuit's core active elements in the main branch. The measurement results show an operational bandwidth of 2.0-29.2 GHz, a noise figure of 4.16 dB (below 26.5 GHz, which was the measurement limit), and a total power consumption of 23.1 mW under a supply voltage of 3.3 V. Regarding the nonlinearity associated with large-signal behavior, the proposed LNA exhibits an input 1-dB compression (IP1dB) point of -5.42 dBm at 12 GHz. These performance numbers confirm the strong viability of the proposed approach in comparison with other state-of-the-art designs.

Keywords: SiGe HBT; cascode; inductive emitter degeneration; low-noise amplifier (LNA); resistive feedback; shunt peaking; wideband.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2022-0-00181, Localiation of microwave materials and components (In-cabin ROA)), in part by the “Regional Innovation Strategy (RIS)” through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) under Grant 2021RIS-001, and in part by in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2022M1A3B8076511, No. NRF-2022M3I7A1085472, and No. RS-2023-00212268) and in part by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-202100000003063), and in part by Korea National University of Transportation Industry-Academy Cooperation Foundation in 2021.