MICROMACHINED THERMOCOUPLE MICROWAVE DETECTOR BY COMMERCIAL CMOS FABRICATION

This paper reports on the design and testing of a thermocouple microwa ve detector fabricated through a commercial CMOS foundry with an addit ional maskless etching procedure. The detector measures true rms power of signals in the frequency range from 50 MHz to 20 GHz, and input po wer range from -30 to +10 dBm. The device has linearity better than +/ -0.4% for input power versus output voltage over the 40-dB dynamic ran ge. Measurements of the return loss, obtained using an automatic netwo rk analyzer, show acceptable input return loss of less than -20 dB ove r the entire frequency range. The sensitivity of the detector was meas ured to be (1.007 +/- 0.004) mV/mW.