D-band stacked amplifiers based on SiGe BiCMOS technology

This paper presents two 3-stage D-band stacked amplifiers developed in a 0.13-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology, employed to compare the conventional cascode topology and the common-base (CB)/CB stacked topology. AMP1 employs two cascode stages followed by a CB/CB stacked stage, while AMP2 is composed of three CB/CB stacked stages. AMP1 showed a 17.1 dB peak gain at 143.8 GHz and a saturation output power of -4.2 dBm, while AMP2 showed a 20.4 dB peak gain at 150.6 GHz and a saturation output power of -1.3 dBm. The respective power dissipation was 42.9 mW and 59.4 mW for the two amplifiers. The results show that CB/CB stacked topology is favored over cascode topology in terms of gain near 140 GHz.