Design of a SiGe BiCMOS Broadband Amplifier for an Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectrometer

A broadband lumped single-ended amplifier in 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS IHP technology is presented. The amplifier is designed as part of a broadband on-chip electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer. Key parameters for this application are a small footprint and a sufficient saturated output power while maintaining a large bandwidth. The designed amplifier consists of an emitter follower and a cascode stage with series inductive peaking. The amplifier has a 3dB-bandwidth of 60GHz and a low frequency gain of 13dB. The core area of the circuit occupies only 0.007mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>. At 30GHz, an input referred 1dB-compression point of −1.5dBm and a saturated output power of 10dBm is achieved.