Design and layout techniques for a mm-wave body-biased variable-gain amplifier

摘要

A two-stage mm-wave variable-gain amplifier is designed and implemented in a 65-nm CMOS technology. A fully symmetric layout has been utilized to suppress the odd-mode of propagation and increase the quality factor in co-planar waveguide transmission lines. Moreover, a new design technique is proposed for implementing decoupling capacitors for mm-wave frequencies. Body-biasing technique is utilized to change the amplifier gain without significant change in the overall power consumption of the circuit. The measurement results show that the amplifier achieves a peak gain of 10 dB with a gain variation range of 25 dB while consuming 12 mW from a 1.2-V supply. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:470–477, 2014.