An Ultra Wideband Low Power Detector Logarithmic Video Amplifier in 0.15µm GaAs

In this paper, a Detector Logarithmic Video Amplifier (DLVA) is designed with 50dBm dynamic range and Logarithmic error less than ±3dB using 0.15 µm GaAs which covers bandwidth of 2–24 GHz. The DLVA structure is including 5 distributed amplifier (DA) stages. The bandwidth of these stages is increased around 5 GHz by applying capacitor splitting technique to the conventional cascode distributed amplifier. The proposed DA achieves a flat gain of 10 dB with less than ±0.2dB variation which is much less than other DAs. Input and output matching are below −15 dB over the entire bandwidth, the average noise figure is 4.66 dB, the average IIP3 is 7dBm and gain compression point is −2.5 dBm. The DA area is 1.64 mm2and consumes 75 mW power from a 2.5V supply voltage.