1-30GHz ultra-wideband low noise amplifier with on-chip temperature-compensation circuit

Abstract

A 1-30GHz ultra-wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) MMIC with a simplified on-chip temperature-compensation circuit is presented in this paper. The temperature-compensation circuit composed of two GaAs mesa resistors and two Nickel Chromium (Ni/Cr) thin-film resistors is able to compensate the variation of temperature accurately over a wide operating frequency range. The fabricated LNA has demonstrated the improvement of gain variation from 3.4 to 0.8 dB (0.4dB/Stage) in the temperature range from -55 °C to +125 °C. It exhibits the lowest the gain variation (0.0022 dB/°C/Stage) with temperature ever reported for the ultra-wideband LNA. By contrasting the LNA with and without the temperature-compensation circuit, it is also found that the use of the temperature-compensation circuit neither degrades other aspects of the circuit performance nor increases the area of the original amplifier chip.