ISBN 978-3-8439-2974-5

978-3-8439-2974-5, Reihe Ingenieurwissenschaften

Mehran Jamshidifar
On-Wafer Characterization of MM-Wave and THz Circuits Using Electrooptic Sampling

144 Seiten, Dissertation Universität Siegen (2016), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

THz waves with the electromagnetic spectrum between millimeter waves and optics are widely used in applications such as material inspection, medicine, astronomy and etc. Optical based systems for generating THz waves are usually bulky and inefficient for the frequencies below 1 THz and, hence, all-electronics approach is promising to facilitate the future availability of THz waves in cheap, compact and industrial solutions. A big challenge in reaching this goal is the characterization of devices, and therefore, electrooptic sampling (EOS) is a superior solution for that. EOS is advantageous over electronic instrumentation, as it offers a much faster and broadband measurement system as well as reduced systematic errors from the calibrations. Moreover, non-contact near field probing is capable of producing high resolution images of devices.

The aim of this work is to demonstrate EOS for the characterization of mm-wave and THz electronic devices. Accordingly, an experimental setup, featured with a large dynamic range, high sensitivity, and high spatial resolution is introduced and a 65-nm CMOS Nonlinear Transmission Line (NLTL) is then chosen as a broadband device under test. In the preliminary measurement phase, jitter of the system was recognized as the major prohibiting factor in achieving the potentially large system measurement bandwidth. Therefore, with a fully coherent synchronization technique, called Laser Master Laser Slave (LM-LS), the relative jitter of the setup was resolved. This allows for extremely enhancing the system detection bandwidth up to 300 GHz which is restricted by the device technology i.e., the CMOS. It is also shown that non-contact probing of nonlinear devices is helpful to detect hidden features which may not be realized by the electronic measurement instrumentation at device ports. In the end, by performing measurements with a THz photoconductive probe, a comparison between EOS and photoconductive sampling in terms of detection bandwidth and image resolution is demonstrated.