A SiGe BiCMOS bypass low-noise amplifier for x-band phased array RADARs

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.23919/APMC.2018.8617208

This paper presents a bypass low noise amplifier (LNA) for X-band phased array applications in 0.25μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The trade-off between gain and bypass modes is considered to achieve high gain as well as low noise figure for gain mode while maintaining reasonable insertion loss with high power handling capability in bypass mode. In gain mode, the LNA achieves a measured gain of 17-14.2 dB and a noise figure of 1.75-1.95 dB over the 8-12 GHz band while consuming 27.4mW of DC-power. The measured input-referred I-dB compression point (IP 1dB ) is -3.9 dBm at 10 GHz. When operating in bypass mode, the measured insertion loss is 6.5-5.95 dB over the entire X-band with the measured IP 1dB of 15.1 dBm at 10 GHz, and it dissipates only 1μW power. Thanks to the bypassing technique, an increase of about 19 dB is achieved for IP 1dB in bypass mode compare to the gain mode. The measured return losses are better than 10 dB for both operating modes over whole X-band. The effective chip area excluding the pads is 0.3 mm 2 .