A nonlinear impulse sampler for detection of picosecond pulses in 90 nm SiGe BiCMOS

In this paper, a novel nonlinear impulse sampler is presented. The architecture uses an ultrafast transmission-line based inductive peaking technique to turn on a high-speed sampling bipolar transistor for a few picoseconds. It is shown that the sampler can detect impulses as short as 100 ps. The chip is fabricated in IBM 9HP BiCMOS process technology and occupies an area of 1.02 mm
²
. The power consumption of the chip is 105 mW.