CMOS microwave radiometer: Experiments on down-conversion and direct detections

This paper deals with the design of fully integrated, silicon microwave radiometers according to down-conversion and direct detections architectures. The low-noise amplification stages have been developed exploiting a state-of-the art 90 nm CMOS process, thus allowing a new class of miniaturized sensors (i.e. SoC microwave radiometers) to be conceived. The LNA developed for the down-conversion radiometric architecture has been fabricated and measured CMOS Microwave Radiometer: Experiments on showing, at 13 GHz, a power gain of 19 dB, a noise figure of 1.4 dB and a power consumption of 17.38 mW with 1.1-V supply. These figures represent one of the best set of performance among those presented, now-a-day, in the literature. Concerning the the direct detection radiometric architecture only post-layout simulations are reported. In this case the designed LNA reaches a power gain of 50 dB, a noise figure of 1.4 dB with an associated power consumption of 32 mW.