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Designing a Broadband Cherry Hooper BJT amplifier for the 30-50 GHz range

Conference Paper · March 2015

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Pragoti Pran Bora Paola Vega-Castillo

Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies EMFT Costa Rican Institute of Technology (ITCR)
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 Designing a Broadband Cherry Hooper BJT
amplifier for the 30-50 GHz range
Pragoti Pran Bora, Paola Vega-Castillo, and Wolfgang Krautschneider
Institute of Nanoelectronics and Medical Electronics, Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg
Email: pragoti.bora@emft.fraunhofer.de, pvega@ietec.org, krautschneider@tuhh.de

Abstract —We present the design of a broadband amplifier to be integrated in a cell impedance measurement
system for carrying out impedance measurements in the frequency range of 30-50 GHz. The amplifier is designed
in a 130 nm SiGe:C HBT with a maximum transit frequency of 250 GHz and a maximum oscillation frequency of
300 GHz. To attain the wide frequency range of operation, the proposed design features two Cherry-Hooper gain
stages, followed by two pairs of cascaded emitter followers as output buffer. Simulations show that the amplifier
provides a gain of 20 dB in 30-44 GHz range with a band pass upper cut frequency of 50 GHz, and consumes a DC
power of 125.1 mW operating at a supply voltage of 3.3 V.

Index Terms – Broadband amplifier, Cherry Hopper Amplifier.

I. INTRODUCTION
Broadband amplifiers need to provide a relatively constant gain and a linear phase response in the frequency range of
interest. However, to keep their power consumption at low levels, while achieving all these requirements, is a challenge.
One alternative for implementing broadband amplification in a compact circuit is the use of a Cherry Hooper
configuration [1]. This configuration circumvents the limitations of the conventional common emitter stages by attaining
negligible interaction between the building blocks of the amplifier. This is achieved by grouping two stages, namely a
transconductance stage and a transadmittance stage, which have large impedance mismatch between them. We present a
broadband amplifier based on Cherry-Hopper gain stages intended for high frequency impedance spectroscopy.
II. PROPOSED AMPLIFIER
The proposed broadband amplifier design is fully differential with three stages: two gain stages followed by an output
buffer. Each of these stages is AC-coupled with each other using coupling capacitors at their inputs to maintain good
dynamic range at the input and the output without affecting the gain in the frequency range of interest. The gain stages
are essentially two cascaded modified Cherry-Hooper amplifiers [2] which provide the required gain and bandwidth,
followed by an output buffer. Both stages are presented in Fig. 1. The output buffer consists of a pair of cascaded emitter
followers to achieve impedance transformation and a large current gain. This also reduces the interaction between the gain
stages from the output loads, which are Gilbert mixers for the intended application of this amplifier. This allows the
frequency dependent gain and output impedance of the modified Cherry-Hooper amplifier to remain unaffected by the
loads in the frequency range of 30-50 GHz.

Fig. 1: a) Cherry-Hopper gain stage, b) Output buffer stage. Resistor values in Ohms, emitter count is specified when
different from 1 or 2.
 The DC gain of the gain stage is directly proportional to the transconductance of transistor Q1, the feedback resistance Rf
and the ratio between the resistances R2 and R1. The peaking introduced to increase the gain of the gain stage in the 30-
50GHz frequency range is expressed in terms of the quality factor Q, which is directly proportional to R1 and inversely
proportional to Rf and the base-emitter capacitance Cπ2 of transistor Q2. The peaking frequency ωn is directly proportional
to the transconductance of transistor Q2, which can be controlled by the bias current IEE2. The gain, ωn and Q can be
controlled by the values of Rf, R2/R1, IEE1 and IEE2. The pole frequency and the quality factor could be increased by
increasing IEE2, by decreasing Rf or by decreasing R2/R1. The first option was ruled out because that would require an
increase in the number of emitters for each of the transistors and wider interconnects to accommodate the increased
amount of current. If Rf is decreased, the gain would be significantly affected. Therefore, R2/R1 was decreased by
increasing the value of R1 without affecting the output swing.
III. POSTLAYOUT SIMULATION RESULTS
The post-layout simulation results of Fig. 2 show that the performance of the designed broadband amplifier is close to
the target specifications. It provides a relatively constant gain of 20 dB from 30 GHz to 44 GHz and the pass band upper
cut frequency is 52 GHz. Power consumption is 125.1 mW. The group delay distortion of the amplifier is 0.37 ns. Since
the intended application of this amplifier involves only monotone signals, group delay is not one of main design criteria.
The complete amplifier core area is 138.26 µm x 140.44 µm. Table I presents a comparison between the proposed design
and similar reported broadband amplifiers. For bandwidth calculation, we have considered the frequency range starting at
30GHz, which yields 20dB gain, and ending when this gain drops 3dB (50GHz). Table I shows that the proposed design
can achieve a good amount of gain and fair bandwidth with relatively low power and area consumption. Although the
bandwidth is lower than that of the other designs, it is important to remind that the amplifier presented in this work is
intended for operation in the 30-50 GHz range and fulfils the requirements of the impedance measurement application.

Fig. 2: Postlayout simulation results of the broadband amplifier a) from 1Hz to 100GHz, b) zoomed from 3 to 50GHz

TABLE I. COMPARISON OF BROADBAND AMPLIFIERS

Design Technology Bandwidth (GHz) Gain (dB) Power (mW)
Cherry-Hooper with inductive load [3] 130nm SiGe HBT 62 5 125
Differential [4] 350nm SiGe HBT 32.5 32 120
Single-ended distributed [5] 120nm SOI CMOS 90 11 210
Differential [6] 120nm SiGe BiCMOS 102 10 125
Differential buffered cascade [7] 180nm SiGe HBT >80 20 990
This work 130nm SiGe HBT 20 20 125.1

REFERENCES
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vol. 110, no. 2, pp. 375-389, 1963.
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[6] J. Kim, J. F. Buckwalter, “Staggered Gain for 100+ GHz Broadband Amplifiers”, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 1123-
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[7] S. Trotta, H. Knapp, K. Aunger, T. F. Meister, J. Bock, B. Dehlink, W Simburger, A. L. Scholtz, “An 84 GHz bandwidth and 20 dB gain
broadband amplifier in SiGe bipolar technology”, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 2099-2106, 2007.

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