Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of a D-Band Bolometric Power Sensor
Milan Salek, Murat Celep, Thomas Weimann, Daniel Stokes, Xiaobang Shang, Gia Ngoc Phung, Karsten Kuhlmann, James Skinner, Yi Wang
Abstract
This article presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a D-band (110–170 GHz) bolometric power sensor, used for millimeter-wave metrology. This sensor type is new thin-film-based sensor, which consists of a multilayer chip embedded in a silicon substrate as a microwave absorber. The sensor demonstrates reasonable performance with a return loss of better than 15 dB across the entire D-band and the rise and fall times better than 1.8 ms. The sensor achieves high power linearity between −10 and +8 dBm. Frequency response of the sensor was measured, and its flatness changes no more than 20% across the frequency band. Furthermore, this power sensor has been characterized in the microcalorimeter, and an effective efficiency of over 90% could be achieved. For the first time, the design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel power sensor prototype with excellent performance at D-band are presented.