mm-Waves design trends in BiCMOS technology

Abstract

mm-Waves building block design is the meeting point of distributed and RF analog techniques. After reviewing the skills of a 130nm mm-Wave dedicated back-end BiCMOS technology, this paper investigates these two design methodologies in an 80GHz cascode differential LNA implementation. A third version of the circuit taking advantage of both approaches is finally proposed. Operating under 2.5V and consuming 17mA it exhibits a 20dB maximum gain at 79GHz, and performs 5.4dB Noise Figure.