A Low Noise Chipset for Passive Millimeter Wave Imaging

Technology for passive millimeter wave imaging has been maturing over the last 4-5 years. One key piece of technology that will allow for large scale production is a low cost front-end receiver. We have developed a two chip solution that addresses this need at W-band. A four stage InP LNA with a pre-matched Sb-heterostructure diode provides a low noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD). Our fabricated chipset provides sensitivities of 10,000 mV/muW over a 22 GHz noise equivalent bandwidth and an NETD of 0.8 K. To our knowledge, this is the best performance to date of a two chip solution for a passive millimeter wave radiometer.