Using Silicon-based Technology To Design And Produce Monolithic Microwave Amplifier

Monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC), such as monolithic microwave amplifiers, are very important for our nation's modernization and national defence. Almost all the monolithic microwave amplifiers, which are needed by the nation, have to depend on import. In order to satisfy the demand of the native customers, we tried to design and produce a monolithic microwave amplifier. This amplifier features not only the characteristics of high power gain, wide bandwidth, low noise and little bulk but also has low designing and producing cost.The following works have been completed in this paper. First of all, the theories about bias, bandwidth, power gain, noise, etc were analyzed. Then, the basic structure of the circuit with two stage cascade, in which were a CE (common emitter) structure as input and a Darlington structure as output was designed and simulated by using spectreRF of the Cadence. The amplifier was produced by MPW (Multi Project Wafer) mode of a 0.6μm silicon-based BiCMOS technology. The transistor used in the circuit was snake shaped transistor with three bases, double emitters and double collectors. The resistor in the amplifier was a poly sheet resistor (72 Ω /□) . Finally, the characteristics of the device were tested and analyzed together with the simulation data.After investigated the demand of the customers, we wanted to achieve thesetargets: the 3dB bandwidth of 500MHz, the power gain of 32.5dB (Min 30dB, Max 35dB) at 100MHz, the noise figure of 2.0dB (Max 2.5dB), the VSWR1 of 1.6, the VSWR2 of 1.5 and the ldB compression point of 11dBm. The parameters of the produced device in this work are: the 3dB bandwidth of 860MHz, the power gain of 35dB at 100MHz, the noise figure of 2.4dB at 100 MHz, the VSWR1 of 1.4, the VSWR2 of 1.4 and the ldB compression point of 13.6dBm, respectively. All the parameters have met our targets.Although the parameters have met our targets, there were still some differences between the simulation data and the testing data. Some reasons have been known, but the others were not clear yet. Further researches are needed in the future.