Development of accurate on-wafer, cryogenic characterization techniques

Laskar, J.; Bautista, J. J.; Nishimoto, M.; Hamai, M.; Lai, R.

doi:10.1109/22.508659

Cited by 31 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Notice that, even if frequency is fixed in the previous discussion, the four primary parameters may still depend on the physical temperature of the transmission line. Moreover, if the physical temperature varies along the longitudinal direction, the primary parameters will also be functions of z, as implicitly assumed with retaining subscripts in Equations (5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12). The formulation presented in this section is, therefore, well suited to take into account the possible dependency of the electrical parameters on temperature.…”

Section: G Avmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The cryogenic probe station (Figure ) has been developed along the guidelines of other realizations described in the literature . The cryogenic chamber is featured by four accesses, each being able to provide a DC or RF path to the DUT, which can be cooled down to 25 K. The frequency is limited to 40 GHz, because of the cables currently used (mounting K connectors).…”

Section: Setup Description and Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Numerical determination of coaxial cable parameters in cryogenic environments for high‐frequency active device noise modeling

Cleriti

Colangeli

Ciccognani

et al. 2015

Int J Numerical Modelling

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This contribution presents an original mathematical method for numerically evaluating the noise parameters of a transmission line subject to an arbitrary thermal gradient. Compared with previous methods, this procedure permits to easily take into account possible variations of line parameters along the propagation direction due to very high thermal excursions. The principal application of the proposed method is coaxial cable modeling in noise figure measurement setups under cryogenic conditions: the connection cable or waveguide from the outside to the inside of the cryogenic vacuum chamber are subject to non-negligible thermal excursions. Under these conditions, significant de-embedding errors may arise if the cables are not correctly modeled, given the very low values of noise figure, which are commonly exhibited by in cryo-cooled devices. The behavior of transmission lines subject to thermal gradients is investigated through extensive 3D thermal and electromagnetic simulations. Simulated data are then input to a numerical algorithm for efficiently determining both scattering and noise parameters of coaxial cables actually used in a cryogenic probe station developed and realized in the facilities of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. A measurement campaign has been performed to validate the simulation-based approach. Subsequently, the numerical model has been used to de-embed the noise contribution of the coaxial cables from cryogenic NF50 measurements of a 70nm metamorphic high electron mobility transistor (mHEMT)

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Section: G Avmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Setup Description and Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical determination of coaxial cable parameters in cryogenic environments for high‐frequency active device noise modeling

Cleriti

Colangeli

Ciccognani

et al. 2015

Int J Numerical Modelling

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“…Progress on modeling [Malmkvist et al, 2008] and fabrication techniques [Ye et al, 2005] has allowed the continuous advance of cryogenic HEMT performance. Despite the fast development and the great demands from various applications, there are a limited number of reports on accurate characterization of noise properties of cryogenic amplifiers [Laskar et al, 1996;Hu and Weinreb, 2004;Randa et al, 2006;Cano et al, 2010;Russell and Weinreb, 2012].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measurement and uncertainty analysis of a cryogenic low‐noise amplifier with noise temperature below 2 K

Randa

Billinger

et al. 2013

Radio Science

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We report measurements and uncertainty analysis on a cryogenic low‐noise amplifier (LNA) with a very low noise temperature (NT), among the lowest noise performances reported at microwave frequencies. The LNA consists of three stages of InP high electron mobility transistors with a gate length of 130 nm. It exhibits about 44 dB gain and less than 2 K average NT in the operational band of 4 GHz to 8 GHz. A detailed uncertainty analysis is outlined to evaluate a variety of error sources in the measurement. The calculated uncertainty shows as low as 0.1 dB on the measured gain of about 44 dB and 0.18 K on the measured NT of 1.65 K, indicating excellent measurement accuracy. A breakdown of the uncertainty components helps identify the major causes of the overall uncertainty and enlightens us about how to further improve accuracy. It is important to know the actual physical temperature of the passive termination that is used as a cryogenic noise source in experiments. Due to its large temperature gradients, the commercial matched load is replaced by a custom‐made attenuator that is isothermal and consequently provides reliable NT measurements of the LNA. The precision measurement technique developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is independent from the manufacturers' characterization method. This study marks the first time that such a low NT from a cryogenic LNA is verified independently with such a low uncertainty.

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“…In terms of integration instead of summation, we obtain (20) where is convolution. Applying the Fourier transformation, while omitting the lengthy intermediate steps, the resulting spectral (Fourier) domain counterparts, as , are…”

Section: B Algorithm Optimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If this cold 20-dB attenuator is removed to allow a nonzero reflection coefficient presented to the cryogenic LNA, the measured results will be highly susceptible because the incoming noise temperatures and are now much larger then the noise temperature of the LNA. Therefore, in order to measure the cryogenic noise parameters, a complicated cryogenic tuner needs to be developed [18]- [20]. To circumvent the tuner idea, the proposed wide-band frequency-variation method is adopted here since it can be easily incorporated into the cryogenic noise measurement setups.…”

Section: B Cryogenic Wide-band Noise-parameter Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Wide-Band Noise-Parameter Measurement Method and Its Cryogenic Application

Weinreb

2004

IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Techn.

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Abstract-The concept of using a long mismatched transmission line to measure noise parameters has been known for some time. However, it has been limited to narrow-bandwidth applications, and a wide-band extension has never been reported. In order to measure the cryogenic noise parameters of a wide-band low-noise amplifier (LNA), a wide-band frequency-variation method is proposed. In this method, the four noise parameters at each frequency are derived numerically from a set of matched and mismatched noise temperatures measured within a surrounding frequency-sampling window. By scanning this frequency-sampling window, noise parameters over a wide frequency range can be obtained. Since this approach can be easily incorporated into existing noise measurement systems, a tuner is not required, and the technique can be applied to a cryogenic amplifier. This paper details the theory, implementation, and verification of this new method. The measured noise parameters of a cryogenic wide-band LNA are presented.Index Terms-Frequency-variation method, noise-parameter measurement.

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Development of accurate on-wafer, cryogenic characterization techniques

Cited by 31 publications

References 20 publications

Numerical determination of coaxial cable parameters in cryogenic environments for high‐frequency active device noise modeling

Numerical determination of coaxial cable parameters in cryogenic environments for high‐frequency active device noise modeling

Measurement and uncertainty analysis of a cryogenic low‐noise amplifier with noise temperature below 2 K

A Novel Wide-Band Noise-Parameter Measurement Method and Its Cryogenic Application

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