0.15mm², DC-70GHz, Graphene-Based Power Detector with Improved Sensitivity and Dynamic Range

This paper presents a wideband, zero-biased power detector circuit based on metal-insulator-Graphene (MIG) diodes fabricated on quartz substrate. The wideband performance, outstanding tangential signal sensitivity (TSS) and dynamic range (DR) of the proposed detector are obtained by employing the diode’s strong nonlinearity together with an artificial transmission line architecture. S11 better than -13 dB up to at least 70 GHz due to measurement equipment limitations is demonstrated. Measurements show a DR of at least 60 dB with TSS better than -65 dBm at 70 GHz. Responsivity measurements for the fabricated detector are 148 mV=mW at 2.5 GHz and 87 mV=mW at 70 GHz. Chip area of the fabricated prototype is 0.15 mm² including pads. A proposed figure-of-merit is used to determine the optimum number of stages quantitatively. According to the best knowledge of the authors, the proposed power detector has the lowest TSS and the widest DR for graphene-based detectors.