200-GHz CMOS amplifier with 9-dB noise figure for atmospheric remote sensing

Introduction: The recent development of millimetre-wave CMOS and SiGe circuits have made silicon technologies attractive also for noncommercial low-volume applications such as the atmospheric remote sensing where III–V compound semiconductors have been traditionally used for the millimetre-wave receiver technology. The possibility to integrate more functions on the same silicon chip would enable reducing the mass and size of synthetic array radiometers and small satellites (cubesats). The scaling of silicon technologies has enabled CMOS and SiGe amplifiers to operate above 200 GHz [1–3]. Although the gain performance of these circuits is promising the noise figure (NF) is not competitive to their III–V counterparts making them not suitable as the first amplification stage for atmospheric remote sensing receivers presented in [4], where InP HEMT technology is used to reach the required sensitivity. However, provided that the NF is low enough (i.e. below 10 dB for the 183 GHz receiver in [5]) and the gain and power consumption are reasonable a silicon amplifier could be utilised so that the receiver NF would be determined by the preceding HEMTMMIC low-noise amplifier. So far an 11-dB NF was measured at 245 GHz using SiGe technology [3] and an 11-dB NF was demonstrated around 210 GHz using CMOS technology [6]. In this Letter, we present the design and measurement result of a 200-GHz amplifier fabricated using a 32-nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS technology, which achieves a 9-dB NF around 200 GHz with a 25-dB gain and a power consumption of 33 mW.