Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

State-of-the-art radio systems, in all of their diversified applications, ranging from wireless communications and radar to emerging millimeter-wave/terahertz sensing and imaging systems, are highly integrated devices in increasingly miniaturized packages. Almost the entire radio circuit, except for the antenna, can now be integrated on one or two semiconductor chips. However, for the antenna to work efficiently its size should be in the range of a fraction of a wavelength (a few centimeters in commonly used wireless bands). This limitation relaxes now that we are migrating to microwaves and millimetre-waves and eventually terahertz (one thousand times higher that commonly used wireless band). The wavelength in these new frequency bands are in the range of millimeter or even a small fraction of millimeter, which, for the first time, makes it possible to fabricate the antenna directly on a chip and realize the entire system on one piece of silicon or other types of semiconductors. The explosive growth of research interest and excitement in emerging millimeter-wave and terahertz technologies is not only due to their extreme information bandwidth and high-resolution/deep-penetration imaging capabilities, but also due to the fact the entire radio system can be put on one or two tiny chips. One of the biggest challenges in realizing such highly miniaturized radio systems with extraordinary performance is to characterize the tiny on-chip antenna elements. Conventional antenna measurement setups cannot be used to accurately characterize the radiated field, which is an essential task in developing of the next generation highly integrated millimeter-wave/terahertz systems for a wide range of applications. The main goal of the proposed on-chip measurement setup is to provide a timely response to this critical research need. The proposed setup can measure the electromagnetic field vectors accurately over a spherical surface over the on-chip antenna. The requested fund is used to develop a unique setup to integrate an on-chip support system with a field scanner that can accurately measure the field very close to a tiny radio chip.