A Low-Power 120-GHz integrated sixport receiver front-end with digital adjustable gain in a 130-nm bicmos technology

In this paper a 120 GHz monolithic low-power sixport receiver front-end including two variable gain amplifiers, a passive sixport network, four detectors and a digital serial interface (SPI) is presented. The measurement principle is based on the additive superposition of two incident millimeter-wave signals, whereas the superposition must be fulfilled under special conditions. After power detection, the quadrature components can be extracted. The proposed measurement system is well suited for industrial radar applications, as well as for biomedical applications and it is further more well suited for communication systems. The receiver has been designed using a 0.13 μm SiGe BiCMOS process from IHP (SG13G2). The whole integrated circuit has a size of 1560 μm × 900 μm and only consumes 102.3 mW from a 3.3 V supply. The receiver exhibits a 1 dB compression point of -13 dBm at the center frequency. The bandwidth is 15.5 GHz and covers the lower part of the D-Band. The gain of the input amplifier can be adjusted from 3 to 16 dB by a digital interface. The maximum power consumption of the VGA is 46.2 mW.