A Stacked MOSFET-Based RF Switch with Inductive Biasing Network

A highly-stacked MOSFET-based RF switch with inductive biasing for the transistors in stack is presented in this paper. The frequency-dependent impedance of the inductive biasing ladder allows achieving fast switching time of the circuit, while having low losses at the operating frequencies in sub-10 GHz range. A hardware prototype with the proposed concept has been implemented in a 65-nm SOI-CMOS technology dedicated to linear switch applications. A reference switch comprising a conventional resistive biasing has been implemented on the same die for comparison. The measurement results demonstrate the switching time improvement by a factor of 10 in OFF to ON switching direction enabled by the switch with inductive biasing. The improvement is achieved at the expense of reduced frequency bandwidth and increased power losses in OFF-state and with no penalty in occupied silicon area.