A 140 GHz to 160 GHz active impedance tuner for in-situ noise characterization in BiCMOS 55 nm

Simon Bouvot (1) , Joao Carlos Azevedo Goncalves (1) , Alice Bossuet (1) , Thomas Quemerais , Sylvie Lepilliet (1) , Guillaume Ducournau (1, 2) , Francois Danneville (1, 3) , Daniel Gloria

1 IEMN - Institut d’Électronique, de Microélectronique et de Nanotechnologie - UMR 8520
2 PHOTONIQUE THZ - IEMN - Photonique THz - IEMN
3 ANODE - IEMN - Advanced NanOmeter DEvices - IEMN

A millimeter-wave active impedance tuner is implemented on the STMicroelectronics BiCMOS 55 nm technology for in-situ noise characterization. The presented circuit is composed of a two stage low noise amplifier with a gain of 11 dB and a NF of 7.5 dB at 150 GHz loading a 64 states passive impedance tuner. This active tunable circuit provides a reflection coefficient. > 0.5 and a S-21 parameter between -7 dB and +4.5 dB in the 140-160 GHz frequency range. At 146 GHz, the noise factor value is from 8 dB to 10.5 dB. The core area is 0.336 mm(2). Its measured performances in noise and S parameters make its integration possible in an in-situ noise characterization bench on Silicon.

Mots clés: Active impedance tuner; D-band noise characterization; BiCMOS 55 nm technology; millimeter-wave integrated circuits

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Simon Bouvot, Joao Carlos Azevedo Goncalves, Alice Bossuet, Thomas Quemerais, Sylvie Lepilliet, et al.. A 140 GHz to 160 GHz active impedance tuner for in-situ noise characterization in BiCMOS 55 nm. IEEE International Symposium on Radio-Frequency Integration Technology (RFIT), Aug 2017, Seoul, South Korea. paper FR_3B_4, ⟨10.1109/RFIT.2017.8048233⟩. ⟨hal-03272701⟩