Active positive sloped equalizer for x-band SiGe BiCMOS phased array applications

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TCSII.2019.2896526

This work presents an active equalizer circuit with positive gain slope at X-Band (8 - 12 GHz). Compared to passive examples, the active equalizer realized better filter and impedance characteristics in frequency of interest with increased functionality for a single amplification stage. It achieved close to 10 dB of peak gain, a + 1.13 dB/GHz gain slope with 2.8 dB NF by utilizing cascode topology. The design reaches a -1.5 dBm input-referred compression point (input-P1dB) while consuming 46 mW of power. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the presented work achieves the best on-chip gain, a gain slope and NF performance in the literature as an equalizer that utilizes SiGe BiCMOS technology.