A Switchless SiGe BiCMOS Bidirectional Amplifier for Wideband Radar Applications

This paper presents a switchless bidirectional amplifier (BDA) with 7-to-30 GHz of bandwidth (BW) and 11.2 dB of peak gain. Common impedance matching networks (IMN) are utilized for both directions, to form a low power and compact amplification stage. It achieves + 0.58 dB/BW of a gain slope, which reaches its peak value at 21 GHz. Its output-referred 1-dB compression point (OP1dB) and group delay (GD) are measured as -2.5 dBm and 41 psec. while having ± 1.5 dB and ± 9.1 psec. variation over the defined BW. Moreover, the BDA dissipates 14 mW of power in 0.42 mm2 of area (including pads). The measurement results demonstrate that the BDA is compatible with the wideband transceiver systems. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the presented design has the best operating bandwidth with a positively sloped gain without sacrificing from the area, power consumption and other remaining RF features such as noise figure (NF).