An On-Chip Antenna-Coupled Preamplified D-Band to J-Band Total Power Radiometer Chip in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS Technology

This paper presents a dual-path single-chip total-power radiometer front-end in 130nm SiGe HBT technology (ft=fmax of 470/650 GHz) operating across D- and J-band with a high equivalent noise bandwidth of up to 150GHz and minimum in-band optical NEP of 23 fW/√Hz. Each path comprises a high gain-bandwidth product 5-stage LNA followed by a broadband power detector and is driven from a separate polarization of the lens-coupled polarization-diversity on-chip slot antenna. The radiometer demonstrates an optical NETD of 0.31K for a standard integration time of 3.125 ms with peak thermal responsivity of 55µV/K and low LFN (low-frequency noise) corner near 100 Hz.