Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of a D-Band Bolometric Power Sensor

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.