Abstract

The traveling-wave (TW) amplifier is known for its large bandwidth, 100 GHz.¹ and moderate noise figure, which is 25% worse than that of a tuned amplifier.² Some studies have already been done on the TW front-end.^3,1 The gate line impedance in both of these papers was 50 Ω. In Ref. 4 the photodiode capacitance was absorbed into the distributed amplifier’s circuit but did not produce a flat equivalent input-noise current density. In this presentation it is shown that an improved noise performance can be obtained by using a gate line impedance greater than 50 Ω and that series inductive tuning can be used to obtain a flat equivalent input-noise current density.

© 1994 Optical Society of America