SiGe BiCMOS LNA’S AND TUNABLE ACTIVE FILTER FOR FUTURE WIDE-BAND MULTI-PURPOSE ARRAY ANTENNAS

In this paper, we present three monolithical microwave integrated circuits (MMIC’s) that potentially may be used in the receiver front-ends of future wide-band multi-purpose array antennas, for example. Two low-noise amplifiers (LNA’s) and one tunable filter have been designed in a 0.35μm bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology containing high frequency silicongermanium (SiGe) hetero-junction bipolar transistors (HBT’s). The use of BiCMOS technologies based on SiGe HBT’s to enhance RF performance could enable RF functions to be integrated on the same chip as complex digital functions. Firstly, a single-stage LNA is presented together with a twostage wide-band LNA. Simulated RF performance of these circuits seems promising in terms of values of gain and noise figure achieved, respectively, over large bandwidths. Relatively wide-band input and output impedance matching together with reasonably low values of power consumption are achieved for these LNA’s. Finally, a 7.3-8.1GHz tunable active filter is also described.