MSc. Thesis Defense: Selim Aras Yağmurlu

ULTRA-WIDEBAND POWER AND LOW NOISE DISTRIBUTED

AMPLIFIERS WITH AREA REDUCTION METHODS

Selim Aras Yağmurlu
Electronics Engineering, MSc. Thesis, 2025

Thesis Jury

Asst. Prof. Dr. Korkut Kaan Tokgöz (Thesis Advisor)

Prof. Dr. İbrahim Tekin,

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Berke Yelten

Date & Time: July 16th, 2025 – 3:00 PM

Place: FENS 2019

Keywords Ultra-wideband, Distributed amplifiers, Transconductance

optimization, Area reduction, CMOS, Low-noise amplifier, Power amplifier

Abstract

Ultra-wideband (UWB) amplifiers are essential components of communication systems, radar, and fiber-optic technologies that require a wide bandwidth, minimal latency. Distributed amplifiers (DAs) effectively manage parasitic capacitances through artificial transmission-line structures, offering inherent broadband performance. However, conventional DAs typically consume large silicon areas due to numerous stages and extensive interconnections, and passives.

This thesis introduces increased transconductance bandwidth with a fully-shunt peaking method in cascode and compact inductor-based area reduction methods with decreased quality factor optimization for distributed power amplifiers (DPA) and distributed low-noise amplifiers (DLNA). The proposed DPA achieves an average 13.75 dB gain and stable output power with average of 13.69 dBm across a minimum 70 GHz bandwidth. The DLNA has a noise figure below 6 dB with an average gain of 13.6 dB within the same frequency range. Both designs, implemented in TSMC’s 65-nm bulk CMOS technology, outperform literature in noise figure, gain, and output power.