SiGe BiCMOS Heterodyne Receiver Frontend for Remote Sensing With Small Satellites

Molecular spectroscopy with terahertz heterodyne receivers is an important and widely used method for remote sensing of gases in space, in the Earth's and planetary atmospheres, as well as in the coma of comets. For the use on small satellites, compact and lightweight receivers are needed. We have developed an integrated SiGe BiCMOS receiver frontend that is tunable from 225 to 255 GHz and have characterized it for heterodyne spectroscopy. The double-sideband noise temperature is 11000 K at a local oscillator frequency of 240 GHz and the Allan time is 1 s. With this receiver, we successfully performed heterodyne absorption and emission spectroscopy of acetonitrile in laboratory experiments.