Traveling-Wave Amplifiers in Transferred Substrate InP-HBT Technology

T. Krämer, C. Meliani, F.J. Schmückle, J. Würfl, and G. Tränkle

Ferdinand-Braun-Institut für Höchstfrequenztechnik, Gustav-Kirchhoff-Strasse 4, 12489 Berlin, Germany

Published in:
IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. 57, no. 9, pp. 2114-2121 (2009).
© Copyright 2009 IEEE - All Rights Reserved. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Abstract:
Promising transistor results of an InP transferred substrate (TS) technology are presented. f_t and f_max are reported as high as 420 and 450 GHz, respectively. Processing has been developed to a full monolithic microwave integrated circuit compatible technology with metal-insulator-metal capacitors, NiCr resistors, and a multilevel wiring scheme. As an example, traveling-wave amplifiers (TWAs) have been designed and realized in a microstrip environment. Simulations of the environment have been done, and are presented in this paper. They have then been used as a design kit to perform circuit simulations. The TWAs demonstrate a gain of 12.8 dB and a 3-dB cutoff frequency of 70 GHz. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the highest proven bandwidth of a broadband amplifier in TS technology.

Index Terms:
Distributed amplifiers, InP heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), integrated circuit modeling.

Full version in pdf-format.