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2418 IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 58, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2023
TABLE II
COMPARISON TABLE
sensitive liquid–helium-cooled bolometer detector and could
not still detect tones above 2.5 THz. The THz sources
presented in [16] and [17] are waveguide modules designed
using GaAs diodes pumped by external GaN amplifiers.
This chip can be used for a variety of sensing applications,
such as imaging [21], gas spectroscopy [30], [35], and Doppler
radar [2]. It can be wirelessly locked to an external reference,
and a small resolution bandwidth can be used at the receiver
side to maximize the received SNR. The broadband nature
of this chip can enable applications such as hyperspectral
imaging.
Although the radiated power above 1 THz is less, the p-i-n
diode harmonic generation approach presented here can be
adapted to other technologies to generate high power. It should
also be noted that the p-i-n diodes in the GlobalFoundries 9HP
process reuse the vertical profile from the n-p-n transistors.
Thus, it is reasonable to assume that as SiGe HBT processes
become faster and provide higher f
max
, the performance of
p-i-n diode multipliers will also improve. The p-i-n diode
multipliers can also replace the conventional Schottky diode
multipliers in a faster technology such as GaAs or InP to
increase the output power.
VI. CONCLUSION
This article presents a SiGe BiCMOS p-i-n diode multiplier
capable of generating power from the THz range to the
far-infrared range. The reverse recovery of a p-i-n diode is
used in this work, to generate strong higher order harmonics.
A peak EIRP of 13 dBm is measured at 387 GHz, and
an EIRP of −3.8 dBm is measured at 782 GHz. An FTIR
spectrometer with a room-temperature DTGS detector is used
to characterize the higher order harmonics chip. Measurements
show tones up to 4 THz, with the highest tone at 4.03 THz
having an SNR of 6.7 dB. Wireless injection locking is also
demonstrated in this work, with a lock range of 42 MHz at
the third harmonic, around 390 GHz.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank GlobalFoundries for chip
fabrication support.
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