Fast Track Article

Wide modulation bandwidth terahertz detection in 130 nm CMOS technology

¹ ECSE Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA
² ECE Department, Ain Shams University, 11566 Cairo, Egypt
³ Institut d’électronique et des Systèmes, UMR 5214 CNRS-Université de Montpellier, 34095 Montpellier, France
⁴ Laboratoire Charles Coulomb (L2C), UMR 5221 CNRS-Université de Montpellier, 34095 Montpellier, France

^a e-mail: knap.wojciech@gmail.com

Received: 11 August 2016
Revised: 7 October 2016
Accepted: 18 October 2016
Published online: 18 November 2016

Abstract

Design, manufacturing and measurements results for silicon plasma wave transistors based wireless communication wideband receivers operating at 300 GHz carrier frequency are presented. We show the possibility of Si-CMOS based integrated circuits, in which by: (i) specific physics based plasma wave transistor design allowing impedance matching to the antenna and the amplifier, (ii) engineering the shape of the patch antenna through a stacked resonator approach and (iii) applying bandwidth enhancement strategies to the design of integrated broadband amplifier, we achieve an integrated circuit of the 300 GHz carrier frequency receiver for wireless wideband operation up to/over 10 GHz. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of low cost 130 nm Si-CMOS technology, plasma wave transistors based fast/wideband integrated receiver operating at 300 GHz atmospheric window. These results pave the way towards future large scale (cost effective) silicon technology based terahertz wireless communication receivers.