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An MMIC X-band Darlington-Cascade Amplifier  

Kim, Young-Gi (Dept. of Information and Communication, Anyang University)
Doo, Seok-Joo (Korea Army Academy)
Publication Information
Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC / v.46, no.12, 2009 , pp. 37-43 More about this Journal
Abstract
This paper describes a monolithic Darlington-cascade amplifier (DCA) operating at X-band, realized with a 0.35-micron SiGe bipolar process, which provides 45 GHz $f_T$. A conventional cascade amplifier was also designed on the same process and tested to establish a reference. Compared to the reference cascade amplifier, the proposed monolithic amplifier circuit exhibits an improved gain of 2.5 dB and improved output power 1-dB compression point of 5.2 dB with 72% wider bandwidth. Measurement results show 19.5 dB gain, 11.2 dBm 1-dB compression power, and 3.1 GHz bandwidth. These results demonstrate that the Darlington-cascade cell is an advantageous substitute to the conventional cascade amplifier.
Keywords
Cascade Amplifier; Darlington-cascade Amplifier; SiGe; HBT;
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