A 260-GHz amplifier in a SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) technology is reported. It is based on three-stage differential cascode topology and adopts a passive shunt transistor pair at the output of each amplifying stage to relax instability caused by parasitic base inductance of amplifying transistor pair. The instability of the amplifier can be mitigated by tuning the base bias voltage of the shunt transistor pair. Peak gain of the amplifier was measured as 15 dB at 260 GHz. DC power dissipation is 112 mW. The chip occupies 300 × 160 μm 2 excluding Baluns and probing pads.
A 200 GHz heterodyne image receiver consisting of a mixer integrated with an on-chip voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) has been developed in a 0.18 SiGe BiCMOS technology. Incoming signals near 200 GHz are down-converted by the 3rd-order subharmonic mixer with V-band local oscillator (LO) pumping, which is provided by the Colpitts VCO with a stacked common-base buffer. The measured minimum conversion loss is 11.5 dB at 196 GHz with an input 1 db compression point ( ) of . The fabricated chip with an area of 600 400including pads consumes total DC power of 25.5 mW. A two-dimensional 200 GHz image acquired with the receiver is presented to demonstrate its imaging application.
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