An Active Terminal Circuit and Its Application to a Distributed Amplifier

Hitoshi HAYASHI
Munenari KAWASHIMA
Tadao NAKAGAWA
Kazuhiro UEHARA
Yoshihiro TAKIGAWA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E90-C    No.6    pp.1203-1208
Publication Date: 2007/06/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1093/ietele/e90-c.6.1203
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Analog Circuits and Related SoC Integration Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
distributed,  amplifier,  cascode-connected,  Darlington pair,  

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Summary: 
This paper describes a broadband active terminal circuit and its application to a distributed amplifier. In this study, we first analyzed and compared three types of active terminal circuits using representative circuit configurations, namely, an active terminal circuit with a common-emitter BJT, an active terminal circuit with a Darlington BJT pair, and an active terminal circuit with cascode-connected BJTs. The simulation results showed that the active terminal circuit with cascode-connected BJTs kept the matching condition up to high frequency. After the simulation, we fabricated a distributed amplifier that used an active terminal circuit with cascode-connected BJTs. The RF amplifier achieved a flat gain of 9.7 1.0 dB over a range of 3-15 GHz.