Active Positive Sloped Equalizer for X-Band SiGe BiCMOS Phased Array Applications

This work presents an active equalizer circuit with positive gain slope at X-Band (8 -12 GHz). Compared to passive examples, the active equalizer realized better filter and impedance characteristics in frequency of interest with increased functionality for a single amplification stage. It achieved close to 10 dB of peak gain, a + 1.13 dB/GHz gain slope with 2.8 dB NF by utilizing cascode topology. The design reaches a –1.5 dBm input-referred compression point (input-P1dB) while consuming 46 mW of power. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the presented work achieves the best on-chip gain, a gain slope and NF performance in the literature as an equalizer that utilizes SiGe BiCMOS technology.