Traveling-Wave Amplifiers in Transferred Substrate InP-HBT Technology

Abstract

Promising transistor results of an InP transferred substrate (TS) technology are presented. f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</sub> and f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> 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 f <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">c</sub> of 70 GHz. To the authors' knowledge, this is the highest proven bandwidth of a broadband amplifier in TS technology.