An S-band SiGe BiCMOS Transmitter for an NV Center Based Quantum Magnetometer

The excellent performance of quantum magnetometers based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, including their high sensitivity, their wide dynamic range, and the possibility for a calibration-free operation, renders them a very promising alternative to classical magnetic field sensors. However, existing lab prototypes of NV center sensors still suffer from a large volume and non-scalable manufacturing technologies. To mitigate this problem, in this paper, we present a miniaturized and scalable microwave electronics platform for quantum magnetometry based on an S-band SiGe BiCMOS transmitter (TX) chip and a custom-designed resonator manufactured on a microwave printed circuit board. The fabricated TX chip can deliver a high saturated output power of 19dBm at a center frequency of 2.87GHz over a wide relative bandwidth of 38.3% of the center frequency to a 50Ω load while occupying a compact die area of 0.593mm
²
. To manipulate the spin state of NV centers efficiently, we use two of the presented TX chips to drive a newly proposed differential resonator, which provides microwave magnetic fields of B
1
=179μT over a large active area of 18.48×10
⁴
μm
²
. Continuous-wave and pulsed optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) measurements are used to verify the excellent performance of the proposed platform compared to the state-of-the-art. In these experiments, the presented platform produced Rabi frequencies up to 5.81MHz.