130 nm CMOS multi-stage synthetic transmission line based amplifier beyond 100 GHz

A 130 nm CMOS complementary-conducting-strip transmission line(CCS-TL)based multi-stage amplifier beyond 100 GHz was presented in this paper. Different structural parameters were investigated to achieve higher quality factor for the matching circuits. Moreover, CCS-TL based Marchand balun was implemented to achieve higher output power. The measured small signal gain was higher than 5 dB from 101 GHz to 110 GHz. DC power consumption was 67.2 mW with VD=1.2 V, and the chip size including contact PADs was 1.12 mm×0.81 mm.