Publication Date
2014
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Elliott R. Brown (Advisor), Mike Saville (Committee Member), Yan Zhuang (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Master of Science in Engineering (MSEgr)
Abstract
The most common technology for electrical characterization of THz devices is DC-coupled contact probes. In this Masters thesis, a non-contact, antenna-free probe is analyzed for characterizing THz devices and integrated circuits. The probe consists of on-chip receiving or transmitting THz photomixers in a co-planar waveguide environment. Our probes are coupled to a CPW-embedded DUT by polarization current rather than conduction current and then down converted in frequency to baseband by an optically pumped photomixer. We investigated probe performance through numerical simulations using High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) carried up to 1 THz and yielded a broadband design with DUT to photomixer promising coupling efficiency above -20 dB with an operational frequency range of 700 GHz between 0.3 and 1 THz, and the average increase in the coupling is ~ 8dB compared to the previous design. Several integrated-circuit techniques are necessary to achieve this performance, such as symmetric side-coupled CPW (SSC CPW), ¼ wave backshort impedance-matching. These will be addressed along with design trade offs.
Page Count
74
Department or Program
Department of Electrical Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2014
Copyright
Copyright 2014, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may be modified only if the modified version is distributed with these same permissions. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
