Cryogenic Millimeter-Wave CMOS Low-Noise Amplifier

In this paper we report a cryogenically cooled CMOS amplifier covering at least 75 to 115 GHz frequency range. The amplifier chip was fabricated in 28-nm FD SOI CMOS technology. When cryogenically cooled to 20 K and measured on-wafer the CMOS amplifier shows 108–155 K noise temperature from 75 to 115 GHz. This means 6 to 8 times improvement in noise temperature compared to room temperature noise. The measured small-signal gain is around 20 dB. To the best of authors’ knowledge, these are the first cryogenic measurements of millimeter-wave CMOS amplifiers and lowest CMOS LNA noise temperatures for W-Band reported to date.