A G-Band SiGe BiCMOS LNA with an Area Efficient Built-In Temperature Compensation Circuit and Robust to TID Radiation

This paper presents a BiCMOS low-noise amplifier (LNA) operating at G-band (140 to 220 GHz ) that is robust against harsh operation conditions, namely large temperature variations and radiation exposure. A SiGe technology (IHP's 0.13-μm SG13G2) has been used for the amplifier design, due to its suitability for millimeter wave (mmW) frequencies and its built-in tolerance to total ionizing dose (TID) radiation. To address the impact of temperature variations on HBTs, the negative temperature dependence of the gain is compensated with a positive temperature dependent collector current, generated by the proposed on-chip and compact (0.0035 mm²) biasing circuit. It has a negligible degradation on the LNA performance, which shows a measured performance comparable with the state of the art with a minimum noise figure (NF) of 9 dB and a gain of 18.1 dB at room temperature, centered around 195 GHz and with a 3-dB bandwidth of 25 GHz. The measured gain and noise figure variations over a -20°C to 80°C temperature range are ±1.1 dB and ±1.5 dB, respectively. Finally, an experiment to study the TID radiation response of mmW LNAs is carried out. Fabricated samples are exposed to 250 krad(Si), 1.5 Mrad(Si) and 2 Mrad(Si), exhibiting a variation smaller than 1 dB in both gain and noise figure.