Micromachined thermocouple microwave detector in CMOS technology

This paper presents the design and testing of a thermocouple microwave power detector fabricated through a commercial n-well CMOS foundry with an additional maskless etching procedure. The detector measures true r.m.s. power of signals in the frequency range from 50 MHz to 20 GHz, and input power ranging from -30 dBm to +10 dBm. The device has linearity better than /spl plusmn/0.4% for output vs. input power over the 40 dB dynamic range. Measurements of the return loss, obtained using an automatic network analyzer, show an acceptable input return loss of less than -20 dB over the entire frequency range. The sensitivity of the detector was measured to be (1.328/spl plusmn/0.004) mV/mW.