Design of an Ultra-Low Phase Noise Broadband Amplifier in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS Technology

This paper reports on a low phase noise broadband amplifier based on distributed amplification (DA) employing travelling-wave architecture. We introduce a design methodology for achieving low phase noise in travelling-wave amplifier (TWA) by integrating appropriate design principles and biasing conditions. The influence of various circuit parameters on flicker (1/f) noise characteristics are investigated, aiming to reduce baseband 1/f noise and its upconversion to the carrier frequency. Using this approach, we designed a three-section TWA that exhibits a gain of 10 dB and a 3 dB bandwidth of around 47 GHz occupying an active chip area of 0.69 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>. Output referred 1 dB compression point (OP1dB) of 12dBm is demonstrated using large signal measurements. Compared against the state of art, our presented wideband amplifier achieves superior phase noise performance of -169 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset frequency for a 10 GHz signal in SiGe BiCMOS technology.